about, and nodding her head at him, “that you are going abroad after a
woman whom you have never seen, and because you like a picture of her in
a paper?”
“I do,” said Carlton. “Because I like her picture, and because she is a
Princess.”
“Well, upon my word,” said Miss Morris, gazing at him with evident
admiration, “that’s what my younger brother would call a distinctly
sporting proposition. Only I don’t see,” she added, “what her being a
Princess has to do with it.”
“You don’t?” laughed Carlton easily. “That’s the best part of it—that’s
the plot. The beauty of being in love with a Princess, Miss Morris,” he
said, “lies in the fact that you can’t marry her; that you can love her
deeply and forever, and nobody will ever come to you and ask your
intentions, or hint that after such a display of affection you ought to
do something. Now, with a girl who is not a Princess, even if she
understands the situation herself, and wouldn’t marry you to save her
life, still there is always some one—a father, or a mother, or one of
your friends—who makes it his business to interfere, and talks about it,
and bothers you both. But with a Princess, you see, that is all
eliminated. You can’t marry a Princess, because they won’t let you. A
Princess has got to marry a real royal chap, and so you are perfectly
ineligible and free to sigh for her, and make pretty speeches to her,
and see her as often as you can, and revel in your devotion and
unrequited affection.”
Miss Morris regarded him doubtfully. She did not wish to prove herself
too credulous. “And you honestly want me, Mr. Carlton, to believe that
you are going abroad just for this?”
“You see,” Carlton answered her, “if you only knew me better you would
have no doubt on the subject at all. It isn’t the thing some men would
do, I admit, but it is exactly what any one who knows me would expect of
me. I should describe it, having had acquaintance with the young man for
some time, as being eminently characteristic. And besides, think what a
good story it makes! Every other man who goes abroad this summer will
try to tell about his travels when he gets back to New York, and, as
usual, no one will listen to him. But they will _have_ to listen to me.
‘You’ve been across since I saw you last. What did you do?’ they’ll ask,
politely. And then, instead of simply telling them that I have been in
Paris or London, I can say, ‘Oh, I’ve been chasing around the globe
after the Princess Aline of Hohenwald.’ That sounds interesting, doesn’t
it? When you come to think of it,” Carlton continued, meditatively, “it
is not so very remarkable. Men go all the way to Cuba and Mexico, and
even to India, after orchids, after a nasty flower that grows in an
absurd way on the top of a tree. Why shouldn’t a young man go as far as
Germany after a beautiful Princess, who walks on the ground, and who can
talk and think and feel? She is much more worth while than an orchid.”
Miss Morris laughed indulgently. “Well, I didn’t know such devotion
existed at this end of the century,” she said; “it’s quite nice and
encouraging. I hope you will succeed, I am sure. I only wish we were
going to be near enough to see how you get on. I have never been a
confidante when there was a real Princess concerned,” she said; “it
makes it so much more amusing. May one ask what your plans are?”
Carlton doubted if he had any plans as yet. “I have to reach the ground
first,” he said, “and after that I must reconnoitre. I may possibly
adopt your idea, and ask to paint her portrait, only I dislike confusing
my social and professional sides. As a matter of fact, though,” he said,
after a pause, laughing guiltily, “I have done a little of that already.
I prepared her, as it were, for my coming. I sent her studies of two
pictures I made last winter in Berlin. One of the Prime Minister, and
one of Ludwig, the tragedian at the Court Theatre. I sent them to her
through my London agent, so that she would think they had come from some
one of her English friends, and I told the dealer not to let any one
know who had forwarded them. My idea was that it might help me, perhaps,
if she knew something about me before I appeared in person. It was a
sort of letter of introduction written by myself.”
“Well, really,” expostulated Miss Morris, “you certainly woo in a royal
way. Are you in the habit of giving away your pictures to any one whose
photograph you happen to like? That seems to me to be giving new lamps
for old to a degree. I must see if I haven’t some of my sister’s
photographs in my trunk. She is considered very beautiful.”
“Well, you wait until you see this particular portrait, and you will
understand it better,” said Carlton.
The steamer reached Southampton early in the afternoon, and Carlton
secured a special compartment on the express to London for Mrs. Downs
and her niece and himself, with one adjoining for their maid and Nolan.
It was a beautiful day, and Carlton sat with his eyes fixed upon the
passing fields and villages, exclaiming with pleasure from time to time
at the white roads and the feathery trees and hedges, and the red roofs
of the inns and square towers of the village churches.
“Hedges are better than barbed-wire fences, aren’t they?” he said. “You
see that girl picking wild flowers from one of them? She looks just as
though she were posing for a picture for an illustrated paper. She
couldn’t pick flowers from a barbed-wire fence, could she? And there
would probably be a tramp along the road somewhere to frighten her; and
see—the chap in knickerbockers farther down the road leaning on the
stile. I am sure he is waiting for her; and here comes a coach,” he ran
on. “Don’t the red wheels look well against the hedges? It’s a pretty
little country, England, isn’t it?—like a private park or a model
village. I am glad to get back to it—I am glad to see the three-and-six
signs with the little slanting dash between the shillings and pennies.
Yes, even the steam-rollers and the man with the red flag in front are
welcome.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Downs, “it’s because one has been so long on the
ocean that the ride to London seems so interesting. It always pays me
for the entire trip. Yes,” she said, with a sigh, “in spite of the
patent-medicine signs they have taken to putting up all along the road.
It seems a pity they should adopt our bad habits instead of our good
ones.”
“They are a bit slow at adopting anything,” commented Carlton. “Did you
know, Mrs. Downs, that electric lights are still as scarce in London as
they are in Timbuctoo? Why, I saw an electric-light plant put up in a
Western town in three days once; there were over a hundred burners in
one saloon, and the engineer who put them up told me in confidence
that——”
What the chief engineer told him in confidence was never disclosed, for
at that moment Miss Morris interrupted him with a sudden sharp
exclamation.
“Oh, Mr. Carlton,” she exclaimed, breathlessly, “listen to this!” She
had been reading one of the dozen papers which Carlton had purchased at
the station, and was now shaking one of them at him, with her eyes fixed
on the open page.
“My dear Edith,” remonstrated her aunt, “Mr. Carlton was telling us——”
“Yes, I know,” exclaimed Miss Morris, laughing, “but this interests him
much more than electric lights. Who do you think is in London?” she
cried, raising her eyes to his, and pausing for proper dramatic effect.
“The Princess Aline of Hohenwald!”
“No?” shouted Carlton.
“Yes,” Miss Morris answered, mocking his tone. “Listen. ‘The Queen’s
Drawing-room’—em—e—m—‘on her right was the Princess of Wales’—em—m. Oh,
I can’t find it—no—yes, here it is. ‘Next to her stood the Princess
Aline of Hohenwald. She wore a dress of white silk, with train of silver
brocade trimmed with fur. Ornaments—emeralds and diamonds;
orders—Victoria and Albert, Jubilee Commemoration Medal, Coburg and
Gotha, and Hohenwald and Grasse.’”
“By Jove!” cried Carlton, excitedly. “I say, is that really there? Let
me see it, please, for myself.”
Miss Morris handed him the paper, with her finger on the paragraph, and
picking up another, began a search down its columns.
“You are right,” exclaimed Carlton, solemnly; “it’s she, sure enough.
And here I’ve been within two hours of her and didn’t know it?”
Miss Morris gave another triumphant cry, as though she had discovered a
vein of gold.
“Yes, and here she is again,” she said, “in the _Gentlewoman_: ‘The
Queen’s dress was of black, as usual, but relieved by a few violet
ribbons in the bonnet; and Princess Beatrice, who sat by her mother’s
side, showed but little trace of the anxiety caused by Princess Ena’s
accident. Princess Aline, on the front seat, in a light-brown jacket and
a becoming bonnet, gave the necessary touch to a picture which Londoners
would be glad to look upon more often.’”
Carlton sat staring forward, with his hands on his knees, and with his
eyes open wide from excitement. He presented so unusual an appearance of
bewilderment and delight that Mrs. Downs looked at him and at her niece
for some explanation. “The young lady seems to interest you,” said she,
tentatively.
[Illustration: “Next to her stood the Princess Aline of Hohenwald”]
“She is the most charming creature in the world, Mrs. Downs,” cried
Carlton, “and I was going all the way to Grasse to see her, and now it
turns out that she is here in England, within a few miles of us.” He
turned and waved his hands at the passing landscape. “Every minute
brings us nearer together.”
“And you didn’t feel it in the air!” mocked Miss Morris, laughing. “You
are a pretty poor sort of a man to let a girl tell you where to find the
woman you love.”
Carlton did not answer, but stared at her very seriously and frowned
intently. “Now I have got to begin all over again and readjust things,”
he said. “We might have guessed she would be in London, on account of
this royal wedding. It is a great pity it isn’t later in the season,
when there would be more things going on and more chances of meeting
her. Now they will all be interested in themselves, and, being extremely
exclusive, no one who isn’t a cousin to the bridegroom or an Emperor
would have any chance at all. Still, I can see her! I can look at her,
and that’s something.”
“It is better than a photograph, anyway,” said Miss Morris.
“They will be either at Buckingham Palace or at Windsor, or they will
stop at Brown’s,” said Carlton. “All royalties go to Brown’s. I don’t
know why, unless it is because it is so expensive; or maybe it is
expensive because royalties go there; but, in any event, if they are not
at the palace, that is where they will be, and that is where I shall
have to go too.”
When the train drew up at Victoria Station, Carlton directed Nolan to
take his things to Brown’s Hotel, but not to unload them until he had
arrived. Then he drove with the ladies to Cox’s, and saw them settled
there. He promised to return at once to dine, and to tell them what he
had discovered in his absence. “You’ve got to help me in this, Miss
Morris,” he said, nervously. “I am beginning to feel that I am not
worthy of her.”
“Oh yes, you are!” she said, laughing; “but don’t forget that ‘it’s not
the lover who comes to woo, but the lover’s _way_ of wooing,’ and that
‘faint heart’—and the rest of it.”
“Yes, I know,” said Carlton, doubtfully; “but it’s a bit sudden, isn’t
it?”
“Oh, I am ashamed of you! You are frightened.”
“No, not frightened, exactly,” said the painter. “I think it’s just
natural emotion.”
As Carlton turned into Albemarle Street he noticed a red carpet
stretching from the doorway of Brown’s Hotel out across the sidewalk to
a carriage, and a bareheaded man bustling about apparently assisting
several gentlemen to get into it. This and another carriage and Nolan’s
four-wheeler blocked the way; but without waiting for them to move up,
Carlton leaned out of his hansom and called the bareheaded man to its
side.
“Is the Duke of Hohenwald stopping at your hotel?” he asked. The
bareheaded man answered that he was.
“All right, Nolan,” cried Carlton. “They can take in the trunks.”
Hearing this, the bareheaded man hastened to help Carlton to alight.
“That was the Duke who just drove off, sir; and those,” he said,
pointing to three muffled figures who were stepping into a second
carriage, “are his sisters, the Princesses.”
Carlton stopped midway, with one foot on the step and the other in the
air.
“The deuce they are!” he exclaimed; “and which is—” he began, eagerly,
and then remembering himself, dropped back on the cushions of the
hansom.
He broke into the little dining-room at Cox’s in so excited a state that
two dignified old gentlemen who were eating there sat open-mouthed in
astonished disapproval. Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris had just come down
stairs.
“I have seen her!” Carlton cried, ecstatically; “only half an hour in
the town, and I’ve seen her already!”
“No, really?” exclaimed Miss Morris. “And how did she look? Is she as
beautiful as you expected?”
“Well, I can’t tell yet,” Carlton answered. “There were three of them,
and they were all muffled up, and which one of the three she was I don’t
know. She wasn’t labelled, as in the picture, but she was there, and I
saw her. The woman I love was one of that three, and I have engaged
rooms at the hotel, and this very night the same roof shelters us both.”
II
“The course of true love certainly runs smoothly with you,” said Miss
Morris, as they seated themselves at the table. “What is your next move?
What do you mean to do now?”
“The rest is very simple,” said Carlton. “To-morrow morning I will go to
the Row; I will be sure to find some one there who knows all about
them—where they are going, and who they are seeing, and what engagements
they may have. Then it will only be a matter of looking up some friend
in the Household or in one of the embassies who can present me.”
“Oh,” said Miss Morris, in the tone of keenest disappointment, “but that
is such a commonplace ending! You started out so romantically. Couldn’t
you manage to meet her in a less conventional way?”
“I am afraid not,” said Carlton. “You see, I want to meet her very much,
and to meet her very soon, and the quickest way of meeting her, whether
it’s romantic or not, isn’t a bit too quick for me. There will be
romance enough after I am presented, if I have my way.”
But Carlton was not to have his way; for he had overlooked the fact that
it requires as many to make an introduction as a bargain, and he had
left the Duke of Hohenwald out of his considerations. He met many people
he knew in the Row the next morning; they asked him to lunch, and
brought their horses up to the rail, and he patted the horses’ heads,
and led the conversation around to the royal wedding, and through it to
the Hohenwalds. He learned that they had attended a reception at the
German Embassy on the previous night, and it was one of the secretaries
of that embassy who informed him of their intended departure that
morning on the eleven o’clock train to Paris.
“To Paris!” cried Carlton, in consternation. “What! all of them?”
“Yes, all of them, of course. Why?” asked the young German. But Carlton
was already dodging across the tan-bark to Piccadilly and waving his
stick at a hansom.
Nolan met him at the door of Brown’s Hotel with an anxious countenance.
“Their Royal Highnesses have gone, sir,” he said. “But I’ve packed your
trunks and sent them to the station. Shall I follow them, sir?”
“Yes,” said Carlton. “Follow the trunks and follow the Hohenwalds. I
will come over on the Club train at four. Meet me at the station, and
tell me to what hotel they have gone. Wait; if I miss you, you can find
me at the Hôtel Continental; but if they go straight on through Paris,
you go with them, and telegraph me here and to the Continental.
Telegraph at every station, so I can keep track of you. Have you enough
money?”
“I have, sir—enough for a long trip, sir.”
“Well, you’ll need it,” said Carlton, grimly. “This is going to be a
long trip. It is twenty minutes to eleven now; you will have to hurry.
Have you paid my bill here?”
“I have, sir,” said Nolan.
“Then get off, and don’t lose sight of those people again.”
Carlton attended to several matters of business, and then lunched with
Mrs. Downs and her niece. He had grown to like them very much, and was
sorry to lose sight of them, but consoled himself by thinking he would
see them a few days at least in Paris. He judged that he would be there
for some time, as he did not think the Princess Aline and her sisters
would pass through that city without stopping to visit the shops on the
Rue de la Paix.
“All women are not princesses,” he argued, “but all princesses are
women.”
“We will be in Paris on Wednesday,” Mrs. Downs told him. “The Orient
Express leaves there twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, and we have
taken an apartment for next Thursday, and will go right on to
Constantinople.”
“But I thought you said you had to buy a lot of clothes there?” Carlton
expostulated.
Mrs. Downs said that they would do that on their way home.
Nolan met Carlton at the station, and told him that he had followed the
Hohenwalds to the Hôtel Meurice. “There is the Duke, sir, and the three
Princesses,” Nolan said, “and there are two German gentlemen acting as
equerries, and an English captain, a sort of A.D.C. to the Duke, and two
elderly ladies, and eight servants. They travel very simple, sir, and
their people are in undress livery. Brown and red, sir.”
Carlton pretended not to listen to this. He had begun to doubt but that
Nolan’s zeal would lead him into some indiscretion, and would end
disastrously to himself. He spent the evening alone in front of the Café
de la Paix, pleasantly occupied in watching the life and movement of
that great meeting of the highways. It did not seem possible that he had
ever been away. It was as though he had picked up a book and opened it
at the page and place at which he had left off reading it a moment
before. There was the same type, the same plot, and the same characters,
who were doing the same characteristic things. Even the waiter who
tipped out his coffee knew him; and he knew, or felt as though he knew,
half of those who passed, or who shared with him the half of the
sidewalk. The women at the next table considered the slim, good-looking
young American with friendly curiosity, and the men with them discussed
him in French, until a well-known Parisian recognized Carlton in
passing, and hailed him joyously in the same language, at which the
women laughed and the men looked sheepishly conscious.
On the following morning Carlton took up his post in the open court of
the Meurice, with his coffee and the _Figaro_ to excuse his loitering
there. He had not been occupied with these over-long before Nolan
approached him, in some excitement, with the information that their
Royal Highnesses—as he delighted to call them—were at that moment
“coming down the lift.”
Carlton could hear their voices, and wished to step around the corner
and see them; it was for this chance he had been waiting; but he could
not afford to act in so undignified a manner before Nolan, so he merely
crossed his legs nervously, and told the servant to go back to the
rooms.
“Confound him!” he said; “I wish he would let me conduct my own affairs
in my own way. If I don’t stop him, he’ll carry the Princess Aline off
by force and send me word where he has hidden her.”
The Hohenwalds had evidently departed for a day’s outing, as up to five
o’clock they had not returned; and Carlton, after loitering all the
afternoon, gave up waiting for them, and went out to dine at Laurent’s,
in the Champs Elysées. He had finished his dinner, and was leaning
luxuriously forward, with his elbows on the table, and knocking the
cigar ashes into his coffee-cup. He was pleasantly content. The trees
hung heavy with leaves over his head, a fountain played and overflowed
at his elbow, and the lamps of the fiacres passing and repassing on the
Avenue of the Champs Elysées shone like giant fire-flies through the
foliage. The touch of the gravel beneath his feet emphasized the free,
out-of-door charm of the place, and the faces of the others around him
looked more than usually cheerful in the light of the candles flickering
under the clouded shades. His mind had gone back to his earlier student
days in Paris, when life always looked as it did now in the brief
half-hour of satisfaction which followed a cold bath or a good dinner,
and he had forgotten himself and his surroundings. It was the voices of
the people at the table behind him that brought him back to the present
moment. A man was talking; he spoke in English, with an accent.
[Illustration: “A man was talking in English, with an accent”]
“I should like to go again through the Luxembourg,” he said; “but you
need not be bound by what I do.”
“I think it would be pleasanter if we all keep together,” said a girl’s
voice, quietly. She also spoke in English, and with the same accent.
The people whose voices had interrupted him were sitting and standing
around a long table, which the waiters had made large enough for their
party by placing three of the smaller ones side by side; they had
finished their dinner, and the women, who sat with their backs toward
Carlton, were pulling on their gloves.
“Which is it to be, then?” said the gentleman, smiling. “The pictures or
the dressmakers?”
The girl who had first spoken turned to the one next to her.
“Which would you rather do, Aline?” she asked.
Carlton moved so suddenly that the men behind him looked at him
curiously; but he turned, nevertheless, in his chair and faced them, and
in order to excuse his doing so beckoned to one of the waiters. He was
within two feet of the girl who had been called “Aline.” She raised her
head to speak, and saw Carlton staring open-eyed at her. She glanced at
him for an instant, as if to assure herself that she did not know him,
and then, turning to her brother, smiled in the same tolerant, amused
way in which she had so often smiled upon Carlton from the picture.
“I am afraid I had rather go to the Bon Marché,” she said.
One of the waiters stepped in between them, and Carlton asked him for
his bill; but when it came he left it lying on the plate, and sat
staring out into the night between the candles, puffing sharply on his
cigar, and recalling to his memory his first sight of the Princess Aline
of Hohenwald.
That night, as he turned into bed, he gave a comfortable sigh of
content. “I am glad she chose the dressmakers instead of the pictures,”
he said.
Mrs. Downs and Miss Morris arrived in Paris on Wednesday, and expressed
their anxiety to have Carlton lunch with them, and to hear him tell of
the progress of his love-affair. There was not much to tell; the
Hohenwalds had come and gone from the hotel as freely as any other
tourists in Paris, but the very lack of ceremony about their movements
was in itself a difficulty. The manner of acquaintance he could make in
the court of the Hôtel Meurice with one of the men over a cup of coffee
or a glass of bock would be as readily discontinued as begun, and for
his purpose it would have been much better if the Hohenwalds had been
living in state with a visitors’ book and a chamberlain.
On Wednesday evening Carlton took the ladies to the opera, where the
Hohenwalds occupied a box immediately opposite them. Carlton pretended
to be surprised at this fact, but Mrs. Downs doubted his sincerity.
“I saw Nolan talking to their courier to-day,” she said, “and I fancy he
asked a few leading questions.”
“Well, he didn’t learn much if he did,” he said.
“The fellow only talks German.”
“Ah, then he has been asking questions!” said Miss Morris.
“Well, he does it on his own responsibility,” said Carlton, “for I told
him to have nothing to do with servants. He has too much zeal, has
Nolan; I’m afraid of him.”
“If you were only half as interested as he is,” said Miss Morris, “you
would have known her long ago.”
“Long ago?” exclaimed Carlton. “I only saw her four days since.”
“She is certainly very beautiful,” said Miss Morris, looking across the
auditorium.
“But she isn’t there,” said Carlton. “That’s the eldest sister; the two
other sisters went out on the coach this morning to Versailles, and were
too tired to come to-night. At least, so Nolan says. He seems to have
established a friendship for their English maid, but whether it’s on my
account or his own I don’t know. I doubt his unselfishness.”