selected a box just across the way, too. It is such a pity to waste it
on us.” Carlton smiled, and looked up at her impudently, as though he
meant to say something; but remembering that she was engaged to be
married, changed his mind, and lowered his eyes to his programme.
“Why didn’t you say it?” asked Miss Morris, calmly, turning her glass to
the stage. “Wasn’t it pretty?”
“No,” said Carlton—“not pretty enough.”
The ladies left the hotel the next day to take the Orient Express, which
left Paris at six o’clock. They had bidden Carlton good-by at four the
same afternoon, and as he had come to their rooms for that purpose, they
were in consequence a little surprised to see him at the station,
running wildly along the platform, followed by Nolan and a porter. He
came into their compartment after the train had started, and shook his
head sadly at them from the door.
“Well, what do you think of this?” he said. “You can’t get rid of me,
you see. I’m going with you.”
“Going with us?” asked Mrs. Downs. “How far?”
Carlton laughed, and, coming inside, dropped onto the cushions with a
sigh. “I don’t know,” he said, dejectedly. “All the way, I’m afraid.
That is, I mean, I’m very glad I am to have your society for a few days
more; but really I didn’t bargain for this.”
“You don’t mean to tell me that _they_ are on this train?” said Miss
Morris.
“They are,” said Carlton. “They have a car to themselves at the rear.
They only made up their minds to go this morning, and they nearly
succeeded in giving me the slip again; but it seems that their English
maid stopped Nolan in the hall to bid him good-by, and so he found out
their plans. They are going direct to Constantinople, and then to
Athens. They had meant to stay in Paris two weeks longer, it seems, but
they changed their minds last night. It was a very close shave for me. I
only got back to the hotel in time to hear from the concierge that Nolan
had flown with all of my things, and left word for me to follow. Just
fancy! Suppose I had missed the train, and had had to chase him clear
across the continent of Europe with not even a razor——”
“I am glad,” said Miss Morris, “that Nolan has not taken a fancy to
_me_. I doubt if I could resist such impetuosity.”
The Orient Express, in which Carlton and the mistress of his heart and
fancy were speeding toward the horizon’s utmost purple rim, was made up
of six cars, one dining-car with a smoking-apartment attached, and five
sleeping-cars, including the one reserved for the Duke of Hohenwald and
his suite. These cars were lightly built, and rocked in consequence, and
the dust raised by the rapid movement of the train swept through cracks
and open windows, and sprinkled the passengers with a fine and
irritating coating of soot and earth. There was one servant to the
entire twenty-two passengers. He spoke eight languages, and never slept;
but as his services were in demand by several people in as many
different cars at the same moment he satisfied no one, and the
complaint-box in the smoking-car was stuffed full to the slot in
consequence before they had crossed the borders of France.
Carlton and Miss Morris went out upon one of the platforms and sat down
upon a tool-box. “It isn’t as comfortable here as in an observation-car
at home,” said Carlton, “but it’s just as noisy.”
He pointed out to her from time to time the peasants gathering twigs,
and the blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences
skirting them. “Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country,” he
said. “It looks as though they went over it once a month with a
lawn-mower and a pruning-knife. I believe they number the trees as we
number the houses.”
“And did you notice the great fortifications covered with grass?” she
said. “We have passed such a lot of them.”
Carlton nodded.
“And did you notice that they all faced only one way?”
Carlton laughed, and nodded again. “Toward Germany,” he said.
By the next day they had left the tall poplars and white roads behind
them, and were crossing the land of low shiny black helmets and brass
spikes. They had come into a country of low mountains and black forests,
with old fortified castles topping the hills, and with red-roofed
villages scattered around the base.
“How very military it all is!” Mrs. Downs said. “Even the men at the
lonely little stations in the forests wear uniforms; and do you notice
how each of them rolls up his red flag and holds it like a sword, and
salutes the train as it passes?”
They spent the hour during which the train shifted from one station in
Vienna to the other driving about in an open carriage, and stopped for a
few moments in front of a café to drink beer and to feel solid earth
under them again, returning to the train with a feeling which was almost
that of getting back to their own rooms. Then they came to great steppes
covered with long thick grass, and flooded in places with little lakes
of broken ice; great horned cattle stood knee-deep in this grass, and at
the villages and way-stations were people wearing sheepskin jackets and
waistcoats covered with silver buttons. In one place there was a wedding
procession waiting for the train to pass, with the friends of the bride
and groom in their best clothes, the women with silver breastplates, and
boots to their knees. It seemed hardly possible that only two days
before they had seen another wedding party in the Champs Elysées, where
the men wore evening dress, and the women were bareheaded and with long
trains. In forty-eight hours they had passed through republics,
principalities, empires, and kingdoms, and from spring to winter. It was
like walking rapidly over a painted panorama of Europe.
On the second evening Carlton went off into the smoking-car alone. The
Duke of Hohenwald and two of his friends had finished a late supper, and
were seated in the apartment adjoining it. The Duke was a young man with
a heavy beard and eye-glasses. He was looking over an illustrated
catalogue of the Salon, and as Carlton dropped on the sofa opposite the
Duke raised his head and looked at him curiously, and then turned over
several pages of the catalogue and studied one of them, and then back at
Carlton, as though he were comparing him with something on the page
before him. Carlton was looking out at the night, but he could follow
what was going forward, as it was reflected in the glass of the car
window. He saw the Duke hand the catalogue to one of the equerries, who
raised his eyebrows and nodded his head in assent. Carlton wondered what
this might mean, until he remembered that there was a portrait of
himself by a French artist in the Salon, and concluded it had been
reproduced in the catalogue. He could think of nothing else which would
explain the interest the two men showed in him. On the morning following
he sent Nolan out to purchase a catalogue at the first station at which
they stopped, and found that his guess was a correct one. A portrait of
himself had been reproduced in black and white, with his name below it.
“Well, they know who I am now,” he said to Miss Morris, “even if they
don’t know me. That honor is still in store for them.”
“I wish they did not lock themselves up so tightly,” said Miss Morris.
“I want to see her very much. Cannot we walk up and down the platform at
the next station? She may be at the window.”
“Of course,” said Carlton. “You could have seen her at Buda-Pesth if you
had spoken of it. She was walking up and down then. The next time the
train stops we will prowl up and down and feast our eyes upon her.”
But Miss Morris had her wish gratified without that exertion. The
Hohenwalds were served in the dining-car after the other passengers had
finished, and were in consequence only to be seen when they passed by
the doors of the other compartments. But this same morning, after
luncheon, the three Princesses, instead of returning to their own car,
seated themselves in the compartment adjoining the dining-car, while the
men of their party lit their cigars and sat in a circle around them.
“I was wondering how long they could stand three men smoking in one of
the boxes they call cars,” said Mrs. Downs. She was seated between Miss
Morris and Carlton, directly opposite the Hohenwalds, and so near them
that she had to speak in a whisper. To avoid doing this Miss Morris
asked Carlton for a pencil, and scribbled with it in the novel she held
on her lap. Then she passed them both back to him, and said, aloud:
“Have you read this? It has such a pretty dedication.” The dedication
read, “Which is Aline?” And Carlton, taking the pencil in his turn, made
a rapid sketch of her on the fly-leaf, and wrote beneath it: “This is
she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand miles to see her?”
Miss Morris took the book again, and glanced at the sketch, and then at
the three Princesses, and nodded her head. “It is very beautiful,” she
said, gravely, looking out at the passing landscape.
“Well, not beautiful exactly,” answered Carlton, surveying the hills
critically, “but certainly very attractive. It is worth travelling a
long way to see, and I should think one would grow very fond of it.”
Miss Morris tore the fly-leaf out of the book, and slipped it between
the pages. “May I keep it?” she said. Carlton nodded. “And will you sign
it?” she asked, smiling. Carlton shrugged his shoulders, and laughed.
“If you wish it,” he answered.
The Princess wore a gray cheviot travelling dress, as did her sisters,
and a gray Alpine hat. She was leaning back, talking to the English
captain who accompanied them, and laughing. Carlton thought he had never
seen a woman who appealed so strongly to every taste of which he was
possessed. She seemed so sure of herself, so alert, and yet so gracious,
so easily entertained, and yet, when she turned her eyes toward the
strange, dismal landscape, so seriously intent upon its sad beauty. The
English captain dropped his head, and with the pretence of pulling at
his mustache, covered his mouth as he spoke to her. When he had finished
he gazed consciously at the roof of the car, and she kept her eyes fixed
steadily at the object toward which they had turned when he had ceased
speaking, and then, after a decent pause, turned her eyes, as Carlton
knew she would, toward him.
[Illustration: “This is she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand
miles to see her?”]
“He was telling her who I am,” he thought, “and about the picture in the
catalogue.”
In a few moments she turned to her sister and spoke to her, pointing out
at something in the scenery, and the same pantomime was repeated, and
again with the third sister.
“Did you see those girls talking about you, Mr. Carlton?” Miss Morris
asked, after they had left the car.
Carlton said it looked as though they were.
“Of course they were,” said Miss Morris. “That Englishman told the
Princess Aline something about you, and then she told her sister, and
she told the eldest one. It would be nice if they inherit their father’s
interest in painting, wouldn’t it?”
“I would rather have it degenerate into an interest in painters myself,”
said Carlton.
Miss Morris discovered, after she had returned to her own car, that she
had left the novel where she had been sitting, and Carlton sent Nolan
back for it. It had slipped to the floor, and the fly-leaf upon which
Carlton had sketched the Princess Aline was lying face down beside it.
Nolan picked up the leaf, and saw the picture, and read the inscription
below: “This is she. Do you wonder I travelled four thousand miles to
see her?”
He handed the book to Miss Morris, and was backing out of the
compartment, when she stopped him.
“There was a loose page in this, Nolan,” she said. “It’s gone; did you
see it?”
“A loose page, miss?” said Nolan, with some concern. “Oh, yes, miss; I
was going to tell you; there was a scrap of paper blew away when I was
passing between the carriages. Was it something you wanted, miss?”
“Something I wanted!” exclaimed Miss Morris, in dismay.
Carlton laughed easily. “It is just as well I didn’t sign it, after
all,” he said. “I don’t want to proclaim my devotion to any Hungarian
gypsy who happens to read English.”
“You must draw me another, as a souvenir,” Miss Morris said.
Nolan continued on through the length of the car until he had reached
the one occupied by the Hohenwalds, where he waited on the platform
until the English maid-servant saw him and came to the door of the
carriage.
“What hotel are your people going to stop at in Constantinople?” Nolan
asked.
“The Grande-Bretagne, I think,” she answered.
“That’s right,” said Nolan, approvingly. “That’s the one we are going
to. I thought I would come and tell you about it. And, by the way,” he
said, “here’s a picture somebody’s made of your Princess Aline. She
dropped it, and I picked it up. You had better give it back to her.
Well,” he added, politely, “I’m glad you are coming to our hotel in
Constantinople; it’s pleasant having some one to talk to who can speak
your own tongue.”
The girl returned to the car, and left Nolan alone upon the platform. He
exhaled a long breath of suppressed excitement, and then gazed around
nervously upon the empty landscape.
“I fancy that’s going to hurry things up a bit,” he murmured, with an
anxious smile; “he’d never get along at all if it wasn’t for me.”
For reasons possibly best understood by the German ambassador, the state
of the Hohenwalds at Constantinople differed greatly from that which had
obtained at the French capital. They no longer came and went as they
wished, or wandered through the show-places of the city like ordinary
tourists. There was, on the contrary, not only a change in their manner
toward others, but there was an insistence on their part of a difference
in the attitude of others toward themselves. This showed itself in the
reserving of the half of the hotel for their use, and in the haughty
bearing of the equerries, who appeared unexpectedly in magnificent
uniforms. The visitors’ book was covered with the autographs of all of
the important people in the Turkish capital, and the Sultan’s carriages
stood constantly before the door of the hotel, awaiting their pleasure,
until they became as familiar a sight as the street dogs, or as cabs in
a hansom-cab rank.
And in following out the programme which had been laid down for her, the
Princess Aline became even less accessible to Carlton than before, and
he grew desperate and despondent.
“If the worst comes,” he said to Miss Morris, “I shall tell Nolan to
give an alarm of fire some night, and then I will run in and rescue her
before they find out there is no fire. Or he might frighten the horses
some day, and give me a chance to stop them. We might even wait until we
reach Greece, and have her carried off by brigands, who would only give
her up to me.”
“There are no more brigands in Greece,” said Miss Morris; “and besides,
why do you suppose they would only give her up to you?”
“Because they would be imitation brigands,” said Carlton, “and would be
paid to give her up to no one else.”
“Oh, you plan very well,” scoffed Miss Morris, “but you don’t _do_
anything.”
Carlton was saved the necessity of doing anything that same morning,
when the English captain in attendance on the Duke sent his card to
Carlton’s room. He came, he explained, to present the Prince’s
compliments, and would it be convenient for Mr. Carlton to meet the Duke
that afternoon? Mr. Carlton suppressed an unseemly desire to shout, and
said, after a moment’s consideration, that it would. He then took the
English captain downstairs to the smoking-room, and rewarded him for his
agreeable message.
The Duke received Carlton in the afternoon, and greeted him most
cordially, and with as much ease of manner as it is possible for a man
to possess who has never enjoyed the benefits of meeting other men on an
equal footing. He expressed his pleasure in knowing an artist with whose
work he was so familiar, and congratulated himself on the happy accident
which had brought them both to the same hotel.
“I have more than a natural interest in meeting you,” said the Prince,
“and for a reason which you may or may not know. I thought possibly you
could help me somewhat. I have within the past few days come into the
possession of two of your paintings; they are studies, rather, but to me
they are even more desirable than the finished work; and I am not
correct in saying that they have come to me exactly, but to my sister,
the Princess Aline.”
Carlton could not withhold a certain start of surprise. He had not
expected that his gift would so soon have arrived, but his face showed
only polite attention.
“The studies were delivered to us in London,” continued the Duke. “They
are of Ludwig the tragedian, and of the German Prime Minister, two most
valuable works, and especially interesting to us. They came without any
note or message which would inform us who had sent them, and when my
people made inquiries, the dealer refused to tell them from whom they
had come. He had been ordered to forward them to Grasse, but, on
learning of our presence in London, sent them direct to our hotel there.
Of course it is embarrassing to have so valuable a present from an
anonymous friend, especially so for my sister, to whom they were
addressed, and I thought that, besides the pleasure of meeting one of
whose genius I am so warm an admirer, I might also learn something which
would enable me to discover who our friend may be.” He paused, but as
Carlton said nothing, continued: “As it is now, I do not feel that I can
accept the pictures; and yet I know no one to whom they can be returned,
unless I send them to the dealer.”
“It sounds very mysterious,” said Carlton, smiling; “and I am afraid I
cannot help you. What work I did in Germany was sold in Berlin before I
left, and in a year may have changed hands several times. The studies of
which you speak are unimportant, and merely studies, and could pass from
hand to hand without much record having been kept of them; but
personally I am not able to give you any information which would assist
you in tracing them.”
“Yes,” said the Duke. “Well, then, I shall keep them until I can learn
more; and if we can learn nothing, I shall return them to the dealer.”
Carlton met Miss Morris that afternoon in a state of great excitement.
“It’s come!” he cried—“it’s come! I am to meet her this week. I have met
her brother, and he has asked me to dine with them on Thursday night;
that’s the day before they leave for Athens; and he particularly
mentioned that his sisters would be at the dinner, and that it would be
a pleasure to present me. It seems that the eldest paints, and all of
them love art for art’s sake, as their father taught them to do; and,
for all we know, he may make me court painter, and I shall spend the
rest of my life at Grasse painting portraits of the Princess Aline, at
the age of twenty-two, and at all future ages. And if he does give me a
commission to paint her, I can tell you now in confidence that that
picture will require more sittings than any other picture ever painted
by man. Her hair will have turned white by the time it is finished, and
the gown she started to pose in will have become forty years behind the
fashion!”
On the morning following, Carlton and Mrs. Downs and her niece, with all
the tourists in Constantinople, were placed in open carriages by their
dragomans, and driven in a long procession to the Seraglio to see the
Sultan’s treasures. Those of them who had waited two weeks for this
chance looked aggrieved at the more fortunate who had come at the
eleventh hour on the last night’s steamer, and seemed to think these
latter had attained the privilege without sufficient effort. The
ministers of the different legations—as is the harmless custom of such
gentlemen—had impressed every one for whom they had obtained permission
to see the treasures with the great importance of the service rendered,
and had succeeded in making every one feel either especially honored or
especially uncomfortable at having given them so much trouble. This
sense of obligation, and the fact that the dragomans had assured the
tourists that they were for the time being the guests of the Sultan,
awed and depressed most of the visitors to such an extent that their
manner in the long procession of carriages suggested a funeral cortege,
with the Hohenwalds in front, escorted by Beys and Pashas, as chief
mourners. The procession halted at the palace, and the guests of the
Sultan were received by numerous effendis in single-button frock-coats
and freshly ironed fezzes, who served them with glasses of water, and a
huge bowl of some sweet stuff, of which every one was supposed to take a
spoonful. There was at first a general fear among the Cook’s tourists
that there would not be enough of this to go round, which was succeeded
by a greater anxiety lest they should be served twice. Some of the
tourists put the sweet stuff in their mouths direct and licked the
spoon, and others dropped it off the spoon into the glass of water, and
stirred it about and sipped at it, and no one knew who had done the
right thing, not even those who happened to have done it. Carlton and
Miss Morris went out on to the terrace while this ceremony was going
forward, and looked out over the great panorama of waters, with the Sea
of Marmora on one side, the Golden Horn on the other, and the Bosporus
at their feet. The sun was shining mildly, and the waters were stirred
by great and little vessels; before them on the opposite bank rose the
dark green cypresses which marked the grim cemetery of England’s dead,
and behind them were the great turtle-backed mosques and pencil-like
minarets of the two cities, and close at hand the mosaic walls and
beautiful gardens of Constantine.
“Your friends the Hohenwalds don’t seem to know you this morning,” she
said.
“Oh, yes; he spoke to me as we left the hotel,” Carlton answered. “But
they are on parade at present. There are a lot of their countrymen among
the tourists.”
“I feel rather sorry for them,” Miss Morris said, looking at the group
with an amused smile. “Etiquette cuts them off from so much innocent
amusement. Now, you are a gentleman, and the Duke presumably is, and why
should you not go over and say, ‘Your Highness, I wish you would present
me to your sister, whom I am to meet at dinner to-morrow night. I admire
her very much,’ and then you could point out the historical features to
her, and show her where they have finished off a blue and green tiled
wall with a rusty tin roof, and make pretty speeches to her. It wouldn’t
hurt her, and it would do you a lot of good. The simplest way is always
the best way, it seems to me.”
“Oh yes, of course,” said Carlton. “Suppose he came over here and said:
‘Carlton, I wish you would present me to your young American friend. I
admire her very much.’ I would probably say: ‘Do you? Well, you will
have to wait until she expresses some desire to meet you.’ No; etiquette
is all right in itself, only some people don’t know its laws, and that
is the one instance to my mind where ignorance of the law is no excuse.”
Carlton left Miss Morris talking with the Secretary of the American
Legation, and went to look for Mrs. Downs. When he returned he found
that the young Secretary had apparently asked and obtained permission to
present the Duke’s equerries and some of his diplomatic confrères, who
were standing now about her in an attentive semicircle, and pointing out
the different palaces and points of interest. Carlton was somewhat
disturbed at the sight, and reproached himself with not having presented
any one to her before. He was sure now that she must have had a dull
time of it; but he wished, nevertheless, that if she was to meet other
men, the Secretary had allowed him to act as master of ceremonies.