It was a pretty little house, in very charming country—in an untravelled corner of Normandy, near the sea; a country of orchards and colza fields, of soft green meadows where cattle browsed, and of deep elm-shaded lanes.
One was rather surprised to see this little house just here, for all the other houses in the neighbourhood were rude farm-houses or labourers’ cottages; and this was a coquettish little chalet, white-walled, with slim French windows, and balconies of twisted ironwork, and Venetian blinds: a gay little pleasure-house, standing in a bright little garden, among rosebushes, and parterres of geraniums, and smooth stretches of greensward. Beyond the garden there was an orchard—rows and couples of old gnarled apple-trees, bending towards one another like fantastic figures arrested in the middle of a dance. Then, turning round, you looked over feathery colza fields and yellow corn fields, a mile away, to the sea, and to a winding perspective of white cliffs, which the sea bathed in transparent greens and purples, luminous shadows of its own nameless hues.
A board attached to the wall confirmed, in roughly painted characters, the information I had had from an agent in Dieppe. The house was to let; and I had driven out—a drive of two long hours—to inspect it. Now I stood on the doorstep and rang the bell. It was a big bell, hung in the porch, with a pendent handle of bronze, wrought in the semblance of a rope and tassel. Its voice would carry far on that still country air.
It carried, at any rate, as far as a low thatched farm-house, a hundred yards down the road. Presently a man and a woman came out of the farm-house, gazed for an instant in my direction, and then moved towards me: an old brown man, an old grey woman, the man in corduroys, the woman wearing a neat white cotton cap and a blue apron, both moving with the burdened gait of peasants.
“You are Monsieur and Madame Leroux?” I asked, when we had accomplished our preliminary good-days; and I explained that I had come from the agent in Dieppe to look over their house. For the rest, they must have been expecting me; the agent had said that he would let them know.
But, to my perplexity, this business-like announcement seemed somehow to embarrass them; even, I might have thought, to agitate, to distress them. They lifted up their worn old faces, and eyed me anxiously. They exchanged anxious glances with each other. The woman clasped her hands, nervously working her fingers. The man hesitated and stammered a little, before he was able to repeat vaguely, “You have come to look over the house, Monsieur?”
“Surely,” I said, “the agent has written to you? I understood from him that you would expect me at this hour to-day.”
“Oh yes,” the man admitted, “we were expecting you.” But he made no motion to advance matters. He exchanged another anxious glance with his wife. She gave her head a sort of helpless nod, and looked down.
“You see, Monsieur,” the man began, as if he were about to elucidate the situation, “you see—” But then he faltered, frowning at the air, as one at a loss for words.
“The house is already let, perhaps?” suggested I.
“No, the house is not let,” said he.
“You had better go and fetch the key,” his wife said at last, in a dreary way, still looking down.
He trudged heavily back to the farm-house. While he was gone we stood by the door in silence, the woman always nervously working the fingers of her clasped hands. I tried, indeed, to make a little conversation: I ventured something about the excellence of the site, the beauty of the view. She replied with a murmur of assent, civilly but wearily; and I did not feel encouraged to persist.
By-and-by her husband rejoined us, with the key; and they began silently to lead me through the house.
There were two pretty drawing-rooms on the ground floor, a pretty dining-room, and a delightful kitchen, with a broad hearth of polished red bricks, a tiled chimney, and shining copper pots and pans. The drawing-rooms and the dining-room were pleasantly furnished in a light French fashion, and their windows opened to the sun and to the fragrance and greenery of the garden. I expressed a good deal of admiration; whereupon, little by little, the manner of my conductors changed. From constrained, depressed, it became responsive; even, in the end, effusive. They met my exclamations with smiles, my inquiries with voluble eager answers. But it remained an agitated manner, the manner of people who were shaken by an emotion. Their old hands trembled as they opened the doors for me or drew up the blinds; their voices trembled. There was something painful in their very smiles, as if these were but momentary ripples on the surface of a trouble.
“Ah,” I said to myself, “they are hard-pressed for money. They have put their whole capital into this house, very likely. They are excited by the prospect of securing a tenant.”
“Now, if you please, Monsieur, we will go upstairs, and see the bedrooms,” the old man said.
The bedrooms were airy, cheerful rooms, gaily papered, with chintz curtains and the usual French bedroom furniture. One of them exhibited signs of being actually lived in; there were things about it, personal things, a woman’s things. It was the last room we visited, a front room, looking off to the sea. There were combs and brushes on the toilet-table; there were pens, an inkstand, and a portfolio on the writing-desk; there were books in the bookcase. Framed photographs stood on the mantelpiece. In the closet dresses were suspended, and shoes and slippers were primly ranged on the floor. The bed was covered with a counterpane of blue silk; a crucifix hung on the wall above it; beside it there was aprie-dieu, with a little porcelain holy-water vase.
“Oh,” I exclaimed, turning to Monsieur and Madame Leroux, “this room is occupied?”
Madame Leroux did not appear to hear me. Her eyes were fixed in a dull stare before her, her lips were parted slightly. She looked tired, as if she would be glad when our tour through the house was finished. Monsieur Leroux threw his hand up towards the ceiling in an odd gesture, and said, “No, the room is not occupied at present.”
We went back downstairs, and concluded an agreement. I was to take the house for the summer. Madame Leroux would cook for me. Monsieur Leroux would drive into Dieppe on Wednesday to fetch me and my luggage out.
On Wednesday we had been driving for something like half an hour without speaking, when all at once Leroux said to me, “That room, Monsieur, the room you thought was occupied——”
“Yes?” I questioned, as he paused.
“I have a proposition to make,” said he. He spoke, as it seemed to me, half shyly, half doggedly, gazing the while at the ears of his horse.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If you will leave that room as it is, with the things in it, we will make a reduction in the rent. If you will let us keep it as it is?” he repeated, with a curious pleading intensity. “You are alone. The house will be big enough for you without that room, will it not, Monsieur?”
Of course, I consented at once. If they wished to keep the room as it was, they were to do so, by all means.
“Thank you, thank you very much. My wife will be grateful to you,” he said.
For a little while longer we drove on without speaking. Presently, “You are our first tenant. We have never let the house before,” he volunteered.
“Ah? Have you had it long?” I asked.
“I built it. I built it, five, six, years ago,” said he. Then, after a pause, he added, “I built it for my daughter.”
His voice sank, as he said this. But one felt that it was only the beginning of something he wished to say.
I invited him to continue by an interested, “Oh?”
“You see what we are, my wife and I,” he broke out suddenly. “We are rough people, we are peasants. But my daughter, sir”—he put his hand on my knee, and looked earnestly into my face—“my daughter was as fine as satin, as fine as lace.”
He turned back to his horse, and again drove for a minute or two in silence. At last, always with his eyes on the horse’s ears, “There was not a lady in this country finer than my daughter,” he went on, speaking rapidly, in a thick voice, almost as if to himself. “She was beautiful, she had the sweetest character, she had the best education. She was educated at the convent, in Rouen, at the Sacré Cour. Six years—from twelve to eighteen—she studied at the convent. She knew English, sir—your language. She took prizes for history. And the piano! Nobody living can touch the piano as my daughter could. Well,” he demanded abruptly, with a kind of fierceness, “was a rough farm-house good enough for her?” He answered his own question. “No, Monsieur. You would not soil fine lace by putting it in a dirty box. My daughter was finer than lace. Her hands were softer than Lyons velvet. And oh,” he cried, “the sweet smell they had, her hands! It was good to smell her hands. I used to kiss them and smell them, as you would smell a rose.” His voice died away at the reminiscence, and there was another interval of silence. By-and-by he began again, “I had plenty of money. I was the richest farmer of this neighbourhood. I sent to Rouen for the best architect they have there. Monsieur Clermont, the best architect of Rouen, laureate of the Fine Arts School of Paris, he built that house for my daughter; he built it and furnished it, to make it fit for a countess, so that when she came home for good from the convent she should have a home worthy of her. Look at this, Monsieur. Would the grandest palace in the world be too good for her?”
He had drawn a worn red leather case from his pocket, and taken out a small photograph, which he handed to me. It was the portrait of a girl, a delicate-looking girl, of about seventeen. Her face was pretty, with the irregular prettiness not uncommon in France, and very sweet and gentle. The old man almost held his breath while I was examining the photograph. “Est-elle gentille? Est-elle belle, Monsieur?” he besought me, with a very hunger for sympathy, as I returned it. One answered, of course, what one could, as best one could. He, with shaking fingers, replaced the photograph in its case. “Here, Monsieur,” he said, extracting from an opposite compartment a little white card. It was the usual French memorial of mourning: an engraving of the Cross and Dove, under which was printed: “Eulalie-Joséphine-Marie Leroux. Born the 16th May, 1874. Died the 12th August, 1892. Pray for her.”
“The good God knows what He does. I built that house for my daughter, and when it was built the good God took her away. We were mad with grief, my wife and I; but that could not save her. Perhaps we are still mad with grief,” the poor old man said simply. “We can think of nothing else. We never wish to speak of anything else. We could not live in the house—her house, without her. We never thought to let it. I built that house for my daughter, I furnished it for her, and when it was ready for her—she died. Was it not hard, Monsieur? How could I let the house to strangers? But lately I have had losses. I am compelled to let it, to pay my debts. I would not let it to everybody. You are an Englishman. Well, if I did not like you, I would not let it to you for a million English pounds. But I am glad I have let it to you. You will respect her memory. And you will allow us to keep that room—her room. We shall be able to keep it as it was, with her things in it. Yes, that room which you thought was occupied—that was my daughter’s room.”
Madame Leroux was waiting for us in the garden of the chalet. She looked anxiously up at her husband as we arrived. He nodded his head, and called out, “It is all right. Monsieur agrees.”
The old woman took my hands, wringing them hysterically almost. “Ah, Monsieur, you are very good,” she said. She raised her eyes to mine. But I could not look into her eyes. There was a sorrow in them, an awfulness, a sacredness of sorrow, which, I felt, it would be like sacrilege for me to look at.
We became good friends, the Leroux and I, during the three months I passed as their tenant. Madame, indeed, did for me and looked after me with a zeal that was almost maternal. Both of them, as the old man had said, loved above all things to talk of their daughter, and I hope I was never loth to listen. Their passion, their grief, their constant thought of her, appealed to one as very beautiful, as well as very touching. And something like a pale spirit of the girl seemed gently, sweetly, always to be present in the house, the house that Love had built for her, not guessing that Death would come, as soon as it was finished, and call her away. “Oh, but it is a joy, Monsieur, that you have left us her room,” the old couple were never tired of repeating. One day Madame took me up into the room, and showed me Eulalie’s pretty dresses, her trinkets, her books, the handsomely bound books that she had won as prizes at the convent. And on another day she showed me some of Eulalie’s letters, asking me if she hadn’t a beautiful hand-writing, if the letters were not beautifully expressed. She showed me photographs of the girl at all ages; a lock of her hair; her baby clothes; the priest’s certificate of her first communion; the bishop’s certificate of her confirmation. And she showed me letters from the good sisters of the Sacred Heart, at Rouen, telling of Eulalie’s progress in her studies, praising her conduct and her character. “Oh, to think that she is gone, that she is gone!” the old woman wailed, in a kind of helpless incomprehension, incredulity, of loss. Then, in a moment, she murmured, with what submissiveness she could, “Le bon Dieu sait ce qu’il fait,” crossing herself.
On the 12th of August, the anniversary of her death, I went with them to the parish church, where a mass was said for the repose of Eulalie’s soul. And the kind old curé afterwards came round, and pressed their hands, and spoke words of comfort to them.
In September I left them, returning to Dieppe. One afternoon I chanced to meet that same old curé in the high street there. We stopped and spoke together—naturally, of the Leroux, of what excellent people they were, of how they grieved for their daughter. “Their love was more than love. They adored the child, they idolised her. I have never witnessed such affection,” the curé told me. “When she died, I seriously feared they would lose their reason. They were dazed, they were beside themselves; for a long while they were quite as if mad. But God is merciful. They have learned to live with their affliction.”
“It is very beautiful,” said I, “the way they have sanctified her memory, the way they worship it. You know, of course, they keep her room, with her things in it, exactly as she left it. That seems to me very beautiful.”
“Her room?” questioned the curé, looking vague. “What room?”
“Oh, didn’t you know?” I wondered. “Her bedroom in the chalet. They keep it as she left it, with all her things about, her books, her dresses.”
“I don’t think I follow you,” the curé said. “She never had a bedroom in the chalet.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon. One of the front rooms on the first floor was her room,” I informed him.
But he shook his head. “There is some mistake. She never lived in the chalet. She died in the old house. The chalet was only just finished when she died. The workmen were hardly out of it.”
“No,” I said, “it is you who must be mistaken; you must forget. I am quite sure. The Leroux have spoken of it to me times without number.”
“But, my dear sir,” the curé insisted, “I am not merely sure; I know. I attended the girl in her last agony. She died in the farm-house. They had not moved into the chalet. The chalet was being furnished. The last pieces of furniture were taken in the very day before her death. The chalet was never lived in. You are the only person who has ever lived in the chalet. I assure you of the fact.”
“Well,” I said, “that is very strange, that is very strange indeed.” And for a minute I was bewildered, I did not know what to think. But only for a minute. Suddenly I cried out, “Oh, I see—I see. I understand.”
I saw, I understood. Suddenly I saw the pious, the beautiful deception that these poor stricken souls had sought to practise on themselves; the beautiful, the fond illusion they had created for themselves. They had built the house for their daughter, and she had died just when it was ready for her. But they could not bear—they could not bear—to think that not for one little week even, not even for one poor little day or hour, had she lived in the house, enjoyed the house. That was the uttermost farthing of their sorrow, which they could not pay. They could not acknowledge it to their own stricken hearts. So, piously, reverently—with closed eyes as it were, that they might not know what they were doing—they had carried the dead girl’s things to the room they had meant for her, they had arranged them there, they had said, “This was her room; thiswasher room.” They would not admit to themselves, they would not let themselves stop to think, that she had never, even for one poor night, slept in it, enjoyed it. They told a beautiful pious falsehood to themselves. It was a beautiful pious game of “make-believe,” which, like children, they could play together. And—the curé had said it: God is merciful. In the end they had been enabled to confuse their beautiful falsehood with reality, and to find comfort in it; they had been enabled to forget that their “make-believe” was a “make-believe,” and to mistake it for a beautiful comforting truth. The uttermost farthing of their sorrow, which they could not pay, was not exacted. They were suffered to keep it; and it became their treasure, precious to them as fine gold.
Falsehood—truth? Nay, I think there are illusions that are not falsehoods—that are Truth’s own smiles of pity for us.
Iam writing to you from a lost corner of the far south-east of Europe. The author of my guide-book, in his preface, observes that a traveller in this part of the world, “unless he has some acquaintance with the local idioms, is liable to find himself a good deal bewildered about the names of places.” On Thursday of last week I booked from Charing Cross, by way of Dover, Paris, and the Orient Express, for Vescova, the capital of Monterosso; and yesterday afternoon—having changed on Sunday, at Belgrade, from land to water, and steamed for close upon forty-eight hours down the Danube—I was put ashore at the town ofBckob, in the Principality of Tchermnogoria.
I certainly might well have found myself a good deal bewildered; and if I did not—for I’m afraid I can’t boast of much acquaintance with the local idioms—it was no doubt because this isn’t my first visit to the country. I was here some years ago, and then I learned thatBckobis pronounced as nearly as may be Vscof, and that Tchermnogoria is Monterosso literally translated—tchermnoe(the dictionaries certify) meaning red, andgora, orgoria, a hill, a mountain.
It is our fashion in England to speak of Monterosso, if we speak of it at all, as I have just done: we say the Principality of Monterosso. But if we were to inquire at the Foreign Office, I imagine they would tell us that our fashion of speaking is not strictly correct. In its own Constitution Monterosso describes itself as aKrolevstvo, and its Sovereign as theKrol; and in all treaties and diplomatic correspondence,KrolandKrolevstvoare recognised by those most authoritative lexicographers, the Powers, as equivalent respectively to King and Kingdom. Anyhow, call it what you will, Monterosso is geographically the smallest, though politically the eldest, of the lower Danubian States. (It is sometimes, by-the-bye, mentioned in the newspapers of Western Europe as one of the Balkan States, which can scarcely be accurate, since, as a glance at the map will show, the nearest spurs of the Balkan Mountains are a good hundred miles distant from its southern frontier.) Its area is under ten thousand square miles, but its reigning family, the Pavelovitches, have contrived to hold their throne, from generation to generation, through thick and thin, ever since Peter the Great set them on it, at the conclusion of his war with the Turks, in 1713.
Vescova is rarely visited by English folk, lying, as it does, something like a two days’ journey off the beaten track, which leads through Belgrade and Sofia to Constantinople. But, should you ever chance to come here, you would be surprised to see what a fine town it is, with its population of upwards of a hundred thousand souls, its broad, well-paved streets, its substantial yellow-stone houses, its three theatres, its innumerable churches, its shops and cafés, its gardens, quays, monuments, its government offices, and its Royal Palace. I am speaking, of course, of the new town, the modern town, which has virtually sprung into existence since 1850, and which, the author of my guide-book says, “disputes with Bukharest the title of the Paris of the South-east.” The old town—the Turkish town, as they call it—is another matter: a nightmare-region of filthy alleys, open sewers, crumbling clay hovels, mud, stench, dogs, and dirty humanity, into which a well-advised foreigner will penetrate as seldom as convenient. Yet it is in the centre of the old town that the Cathedral stands, the Cathedral of Sankt Iakov, an interesting specimen of Fifteenth Century Saracenic, having been erected by the Sultan Mohammed II., as a mosque.
Of the Royal Palace I obtain a capital view from the window of my room in the Hôtel de Russie.
“A vast irregular pile,” in the language of my guide-book, “it is built on the summit of an eminence which dominates the town from the west.” The “eminence” rises gradually from this side to a height of perhaps a hundred feet, but breaks off abruptly on the other in a sheer cliff overhanging the Danube. The older portions of the Palace spring from the very brink of the precipice, so that, leaning from their ramparts, you could drop a pebble straight into the current, an appalling depth below. And, still to speak by the book, these older portions “vie with the Cathedral in architectural interest.” What I see from my bedroom is a formidable, murderous-looking Saracenic castle: huge perpendicular quadrangles of blank, windowless, iron-grey stone wall (curtains, are they technically called?), connecting massive square towers; and the towers are surmounted by battlements and pierced by meurtrières. It stands out very bold and black, gloomy and impressive, when the sun sets behind it, in the late afternoon. I could suppose the place quite impregnable, if not inaccessible; and it’s a mystery to me how Peter the Great ever succeeded in taking it, as History will have it that he did, by assault.
The modern portions of the Palace are entirely commonplace and cheerful. The east wing, visible from where I am seated writing, might have been designed by Baron Haussmann: a long stretch of yellow façade—dazzling to the sight just now, in the morning sunshine—with a French roof, of slate, and a box of gay-tinted flowers in each of its countless windows.
Behind the Palace there is a large and very lovely garden, reserved to the uses of the Royal Household; and beyond that, the Dunayskiy Prospekt, a park that covers about sixty acres, and is open to the public.
The first floor, thepiano nobile, of that east wing is occupied by the private apartments of the King and Queen.
I look across the quarter-mile of red-tiled housetops that separate me from their Majesties’ habitation, and I fancy the life that is going on within. It is too early in the day for either of them to be abroad, so they are certainly there, somewhere behind those gleaming windows: TheodoreKrolt and AnéliKroleva.
She, I would lay a wager, is in her music-room, at her piano, practising a song with Florimond. She is dressed in white (I always think of her as dressed in white—doubtless because she wore a white frock the first time I saw her), and her brown hair is curling loose about her forehead, her maids not having yet imprisoned it. I declare, I can almost hear her voice:tra-la-lira-la-la: mastering a trill; while Florimond, pink, and plump, and smiling, walks up and down the room, nodding his head to mark the time, and every now and then interrupting her with a suggestion.
The King, at this hour, will be in his study, in dressing-gown and slippers—a tattered old dingy brown dressing-gown, out at elbows—at his big wildly-littered writing-table, producing “copy,” to the accompaniment of endless cigarettes and endless glasses of tea. (Monterossan cigarettes are excellent, and Monterossan tea is always served in glasses.) The King has literary aspirations, and—like Frederick the Great—coaxes his muse in French. You will occasionally see aconteof his in theNouvelle Revue, signed by the artful pseudonym, Théodore Montrouge.
At one o’clock to-day I am to present myself at the Palace, and to be received by their Majesties in informal audience; and then I am to have the honour of lunching with them. If I were on the point of lunching with any other royal family in Europe.... But, thank goodness, I’m not; and I needn’t pursue the distressing speculation. Queen Anéli and King Theodore are—for a multitude of reasons—a Queen and King apart.
You see, when he began life, Theodore IV. was simply Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, the younger son of a nephew of the reigning Krol, Paul III,; and nobody dimly dreamed that he would ever ascend the throne. So he went to Paris, and “made his studies” in the Latin Quarter, like any commoner.
In those days—as, I dare say, it still is in these—the Latin Quarter was crowded with students from the far South-east. Servians, Roumanians, Monte-rossans, grew, as it were, on every bush; we even had a sprinkling of Bulgarians and Montenegrins; and those of them who were not (more or less vaguely) princes, you could have numbered on your fingers. And, anyhow, in that democratic and self-sufficient seat of learning, titles count for little, and foreign countries are a matter of consummate ignorance and jaunty unconcern. The Duke of Plaza-Toro, should he venture in the classical Boul’ Miche, would have to cede thepasto the latest hero of the Beaux-Arts, or bully from the School of Medicine, even though the hero were the son of a village apothecary, and the bully reeked to heaven of absinthe and tobacco; while the Prime Minister of England would find his name, it is more than to be feared, unknown, and himself regarded as a person of quite extraordinary unimportance.
So we accepted Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, and tried him by his individual merits, for all the world as if he were made of the same flesh and blood as Tom, Dick, and Harry; and thee-and-thou’d him, and hailed him asmon vieux, as merrily as we did everybody else. Indeed, I shouldn’t wonder if the majority of those who knew him were serenely unaware that his origin was royal (he would have been the last to apprise them of it), and roughly classed him with our otherprinces valaques. For convenience sake, we lumped them all—the divers natives of the lands between the Black Sea and the Adriatic—under the generic name, Valaques; we couldn’t be bothered with nicer ethnological distinctions.
We tried Prince Theodore by his individual merits; but, as his individual merits happened to be signal, we liked him very much. He hadn’t a trace of “side;” his pockets were full of money; he was exceedingly free-handed. No man was readier for a lark, none more inventive or untiring in the prosecution of one. He was a brilliant scholar, besides, and almost the best fencer in the Quarter. And he was pleasantly good-looking—fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a friendly humorous face, a pointed beard, and a slight, agile, graceful figure. Everybody liked him, and everybody was sorry when he had to leave us, and return to his ultra-mundane birthplace. “It can’t be helped,” he said. “I must go home and do three years of military service. But then I shall come back. I mean always to live in Paris.”
That was in ’82. But he never came back. For, before his three years of military service were completed, the half-dozen cousins and the brother who stood between him and the throne, had one by one died off, and Theodore himself had succeeded to the dignity ofKrolevitch,—as they call their Heir-Presumptive. In 1886 he married. And, finally, in ’88, his great-uncle Paul also died—at the age of ninety-seven, if you please—and Theodore was duly proclaimed Krol.
He didn’t forget his ancient cronies, though; and I was only one of those whom he invited to come and stay with him in his Palace. I came, and stayed.... eleven months! That seems egregious; but what will you say of another of us, Arthur Fleet (or Florimond, as their Majesties have nicknamed him), who came at the same time, and has stayed ever since? The fact is, the King is a tenacious as well as a delightful host; if he once gets you within his portals, he won’t let you go without a struggle. “We do bore ourselves so improbably out here, you know,” he explains. “The society of a Christian is a thing we’d commit a crime for.”
Theodore’s consort, Anéli Isabella,Kroleva Tcherrnnogory—videtheAlmanach de Gotha—is the third daughter of the late Prince Maximilian of Wittenburg; sister, therefore, to that young Prince Waldemar who comes almost every year to England, and with whose name and exploits as a yachtsman all conscientious students of the daily press will be familiar; and cousin to the reigning Grand Duke Ernest.
Theoretically German, she is, however, to all intents and purposes, French; for her mother, the Princess Célestine (of Bourbon-Morbihan), was a Frenchwoman, and, until her marriage, I fancy that more than half of Anéli’s life was passed between Nice and Paris. She openly avows, moreover, that she “detests Germany, the German language, the German people, and all things German, and adores France and the French.” And her political sympathies are entirely with the Franco-Russ alliance.
She is a deliciously pretty little lady, with curling soft-brown hair, a round, very young-looking face, a delicate rose-and-ivory complexion, and big, bright, innocent brown eyes—innocent, yet with plenty of potential archness, even potential mischief, lurking in them. She has beautiful full red lips, besides, and exquisite little white teeth. Florimond wrote a triolet about her once, in which he described her as “une fleur en porcelaine.” Her Majesty repudiated the phrase indignantly. “Why not say a wax-doll, and be done with it?” she demanded. All the same, “fleur en porcelaine” does, in a manner, suggest the general effect of her appearance, its daintiness, its finish, its crisp chiselling, its clear, pure colour. Whereas, nothing could be more misleading than “wax-doll,” for there is character, character, in every molecule of her person.
The Queen’s character, indeed, is what I wish I could give some idea of It is peculiar, it is distinctive; to me, at any rate, it is infinitely interesting and diverting; but, by the same token—if I may hazard so to qualify it—it is a trifle.... a trifle.... difficult.
“You’re such an arbitrary gent!” I heard Florimond complain to her, one day. (I heard and trembled, but the Queen only laughed.) And that will give you an inkling of what I mean.
If she likes you, if you amuse her, and if you never remotely oppose or question her desire of the moment, she can be all that is most gracious, most reasonable, most captivating: an inspiring listener, an entertaining talker: mingling the naïveté, the inexperience of evil, the half comical, half appealing unsophistication, of a girl, of a child almost—of one who has always lived far aloof from the struggle and uncleanness of the workaday world—with the wit, the humour, the swift appreciation and responsiveness of an exceedingly impressionable, clear-sighted, and accomplished woman.
But... but....
Well, I suppose, the right way of putting it would be to say, in the consecrated formula, that she has the defects of her qualities. Having preserved something of a child’s simplicity, she has not entirely lost a child’s wilfulness, a child’s instability of mood, a child’s trick of wearing its heart upon its sleeve. She has never perfectly acquired a grown person’s power of controlling or concealing her emotions.
If youdon’thappen to amuse her—if, by any chance, it is your misfortune toboreher, no matter how slightly; and, oh, she is so easily bored!—the atmosphere changes in a twinkling: the sun disappears, clouds gather, the temperature falls, and (unless you speedily “brisken up,” or fly her presence) you may prepare for most uncomfortable weather. If you manifest the faintest hesitation in complying with her momentary wishes, if you raise the mildest objection to them—gare à vous!Her face darkens, ominous lightning flashes in her eyes, her under-lip swells dangerously; she very likely stamps her foot imperiously; and you are to be accounted lucky if you don’t get a smart dab from the barbed end of her royal tongue. And if she doesn’t like you, though she may think she is trying with might and main to disguise the fact and to treat you courteously, you know it directly, and you go away with the persuasion that she has been, not merely cold and abstracted, but downright uncivil.
In a word, Queen Anéli is hasty, she is impatient.
And, in addition to that, she is uncertain. You can never tell beforehand, by any theory of probabilities based on past experience, what will or will not, on any given occasion, cause her to smile or frown. The thing she expressed a desire for yesterday, may offend her to-day, The suggestion that offended her yesterday, to-day she may welcome with joyous enthusiasm. You must approach her gingerly, tentatively; you must feel your ground.
“Oh, most dread Sovereign,” said Florimond, “if you won’t fly out at me, I would submit, humbly, that you’d better not drive this afternoon in your victoria, in your sweet new frock, for, unless all signs fail, it’s going to rain like everything.”
She didn’t fly out at him exactly; but she retorted succinctly, with a peremptory gesture, “No, it’snotgoing to rain,” as who should say, “It daren’t.” And she drove in her victoria, and spoiled her sweet new frock. “Not to speak of my sweet new top-hat,” sighs Florimond, who attended her; “the only Lincoln and Bennett topper in the whole length and breadth of Monterosso.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain; and then... she isintense. She talks in italics, she feels in superlatives; she admits no comparative degree, no emotional half-tones. When she is notecstaticallyhappy, she isdesperatelymiserable; wonders why she was ever born into this worst of all possible worlds; wishes she were dead; and even sometimes drops dark hints of meditated suicide. When she is not in the brightest of affable humours, she is in the blackest of cross ones. She eitherlovesa thing, or shesimply can’t endure it;—the thing may be a town, a musical composition, a perfume, or a person. She either loves you, or simply can’t endure you; and she’s very apt to love you and to cease to love you alternately—or, at least, to give you to understand as much—three or four times a day. It is winter midnight or summer noon, a climate of extremes.
“Do you like the smell of tangerine-skin?”
Every evening for a week, when, at the end of dinner, the fruit was handed round, the King asked her that question; and she, never suspecting his malice, answered invariably, as she crushed a bit between her fingers, and fervidly inhaled its odour, “Oh, do Ilikeit? Iadoreit. It’s perfectrapture.”
She is hasty, she is uncertain, she is intense. Will you be surprised when I go on to insist that, down deep, she is altogether well-meaning and excessively tender-hearted, and when I own that among all the women I know I can think of none other who seems to me so attractive, so fascinating, so sweetly feminine and loveable? (Oh, no, I am notin lovewith her, not in the least—though I don’t say that I mightn’t be, if I were a king, or she were not a queen.) If she realises that she has been unreasonable, she is the first to confess it; she repents honestly, and makes the devoutest resolutions to amend. If she discovers that she has hurt anybody’s feelings, her conscience will not give her a single second of peace, until she has sought her victim out and heaped him with benefits. If she believes that this or that distasteful task forms in very truth a part of her duty, she will go to any length of persevering self-sacrifice to accomplish it.
She has a hundred generous and kindly impulses, where she has one that is perverse or inconsiderate. Bring any case of distress or sorrow to her notice, and see how instantly her eyes soften, how eager she is to be of help. And in her affections, however mercurial she may appear on the surface, she is really constant, passionate, and, in great things, forbearing. She and her husband, for example, though they have been married perilously near ten years, are little better than a pair of sweethearts (and jealous sweethearts, at that: you should have been present on a certain evening when we had been having a long talk and laugh over old days in the Latin Quarter, and an evil spirit prompted one of us to regale her Majesty with a highly-coloured account of Theodore’s youthful infatuation for Nina Childe!... Oh, their faces! Oh, the silence! ); and then, witness her devotion to her brother, to her sisters; her fondness for Florimond, for Madame Donarowska, who was her governess when she was a girl, and now lives with her in the Palace.
“I am writing a fairy-tale,” Florimond said to her “about Princess Gugglegoo and Princess Raggle-snag.”
“Oh?” questioned the Queen. “And who werethey?”
“Princess Gugglegoo was all sweetness and pinkness, softness and guilelessness, a rose full of honey, and without a thorn; a perfect little cherub; oh, such a duck! Princess Ragglesnag was all corners and sharp edges, fire and fret, dark moods and quick angers; oh, such an intolerant, dictatorial, explosive, tempestuous princess! You could no more touch her than you could touch a nettle, or a porcupine, or a live coal, or a Leyden jar, or any other prickly, snaggy, knaggy, incandescent, electric thing. You were obliged to mind your p’s and q’s with her! But no matter how carefully you minded them, she was sure to let you have it, sooner or later; you were sure torileher, one way or another: she was that cantankerous and tetchy, and changeable and unexpected.—And then.... Well, what do you suppose?”
“I’m waiting to hear,” the Queen replied, a little drily.
“Oh, there! If you’re going to be grumpy, ma’am, I won’t play,” cried Florimond.
“I’m not grumpy. Only, your characters are rather conventionally drawn. However, go on, go on.”
“There was a distinct suggestion of menace in your tone. But never mind. If you didn’t really mean it, we’ll pretend there wasn’t.—Well, my dears,” he went on, turning, so as to include the King in his audience, “you neverwillbelieve me, but it’s a solemn, sober fact that these two princesses were twin sisters, and that they looked so much alike that nobody, not even their own born mother, could tell them apart. Now, wasn’tthatsurprising? Only Ragglesnag looked like Gugglegoo suddenly curdled and gone sour, you know; and Gugglegoo looked like Ragglesnag suddenly wreathed out in smiles and graces. So that the courtiers used to say ’Hello! Whatcanhave happened? Here comes dear Princess Gugglegoo looking as black as thunder.’ Or else—’Bless us and save us! What’sthismiracle? Here comes old Ragglesnag looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ Well, and then....”
“Oh, you needn’t continue,” the Queen interrupted, bridling. “You’re tedious and obvious, and utterly unfair and unjust. I hope I’m not an insipid little fool, like Gugglegoo; but I don’t think I’m quite a termagant, either, like your horrid exaggerated Ragglesnag.”
“Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” wailed Florimond. “Whywillpeople go and make a personal application or everything a fellow says? If I had been even remotely thinking of your Majesty, I should never have dreamed of calling her by either of those ridiculous outlandish names. Gugglegoo and Ragglesnag, indeed!”
“Whatwouldyou have called her?” the King asked, who was chuckling inscrutably in his armchair.
“Well, Imighthave called her Ragglegoo, and Imighthave called her Gugglesnag. But I hope I’m much too discerning ever to have applied such a sweeping generalisation to her as Ragglesnag, or such a silly, sugary sort of barbarism as Gugglegoo.”
“It’s perfectly useless,” the Queen broke out, bitterly, “to expect aman—even a comparatively intelligent and highly-developed man, like Florimond—to understand the subtleties of a woman’s nature, or to sympathise with the difficulties of her life. When she isn’t as crude, and as blunt, and as phlegmatic, and as insensitive, and as transparent and commonplace and all-of-one-piece as themselves, men always think a woman’s unreasonable and capricious and infantile. It’s a littletoodiscouraging. Here I wear myself to a shadow, and bore and worry myself to extermination, with all the petty contemptible cares and bothers and pomps and ceremonies of this tiresome little Court; and that’s all the thanks I get—to be laughed at by my husband, and lectured and ridiculed in stupid allegories by Florimond! It’s a littletoohard. Oh, if you’d only let me go away, and leave it all behind me! I’d go to Paris and change my name, and become a concert-singer. It’s the only thing I really care for—to sing and sing and sing. Oh, if I could only go and make a career as a concert-singer in Paris! Will you let me? Will you?Willyou?” she demanded, vehemently, of her husband.
“That’s rather a radical measure to bring up for discussion at this hour of the night, isn’t it?” the King suggested, laughing.
“But it’s quite serious enough for you to afford to consider it. And I don’t see why one hour isn’t as good as another.Willyou let me go to Paris and become a concert-singer?”
“What! And leave poor me alone and forlorn here in Vescova? Oh, my dear, you wouldn’t desert your own lawful spouse in that regardless manner!”
“I don’t see what ’lawful’ has to do with it. You don’t half appreciate me. You think I’m childish, and capricious, and bad-tempered, and everything that’s absurd and idiotic. I don’t see why I should waste my life and my youth, stagnating in this out-of-the-way corner of Nowhere, with a man who doesn’t appreciate me, and who thinks I’m childish and idiotic, when I could go to Paris and have a life of my own, and a career, and do the only thing in the world I really care for. Will you let me go? Answer. Will you?”
But the King only laughed.
“And besides,” the Queen went on, in a minute, “if you really missed me, you could come too. You could abdicate. Why shouldn’t you? Instead of staying here, and boring and worrying ourselves to death as King and Queen of this ungrateful, insufferable, little unimportant ninth-rate make-believe of a country, why shouldn’t we abdicate and go to Paris, and be a Man and a Woman, and have a little Life, instead of this dreary, artificial, cardboard sort of puppet-show existence? You could devote yourself to literature, and I’d go on the concert-stage, and we’d have a delightful little house in the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and be perfectly happy. Of course, Flori-mond would come with us. Why shouldn’t we? Oh, if you only would Î Will you? Will you, Theo?” she pleaded earnestly.
The King looked at his watch. “It’s nearly midnight, my dear,” he said. “High time, I should think, to adjourn the debate. But if, when you wake up to-morrow morning, you wish to resume it, Flori-mond and I will be at your disposal. Meanwhile, we’re losing our beauty-sleep; and I, for one, am going to bed.”
“Oh, it’s always like that!” the Queen complained. “You never do me the honour of taking seriously anything I say. It’s intolerable. I don’t think any woman was ever so badly treated.”
She didn’t recur to the subject next day, however, but passed the entire morning with Florimond, planning the details of a garden-party, and editing the list of guests; and she threw her whole soul into it too. So that, when the King looked in upon them a little before luncheon, Florimond smiled at him significantly (indeed, I’m not sure he didn’twinkat him) and called out, “Oh, weareenjoying ourselves. Please don’t interrupt. Go back to your counting-house and count out your money, and leave us in the parlour to eat our bread and honey.”
It is in the nature of things, doubtless, that a temperament such as I have endeavoured to suggest should find the intensity of its own feelings reflected by those that it excites in others. One would expect to hear that the people who like Queen Anéli like her tremendously, and that the people who don’t like her tremendously don’t like her at all. And, in effect, that is precisely the lady’s case. She is tremendously liked by those who are near to her, and who are therefore in a position to understand her and to make allowances. They love the woman in her; they laugh at and love the high-spirited, whimsical, impetuous, ingenuous child. But those who are at a distance from her, or who meet her only rarely and formally, necessarily fail to understand her, and are apt, accordingly, neither to admire her greatly, nor to bear her much good will. And, of course, while the people who are near to her can be named by twos and threes, those who view her from a distance must be reckoned with by thousands. And this brings me to a painful circumstance, which I may as well mention without more ado. At Vescova—as you could scarcely spend a day in the town and not become aware—Queen Anéli is anything you please but popular.
“The inhabitants of Monterosso,” says M. Boridov, in his interesting history of that country, “fall into three rigidly separated castes: the nobility, a bare handful of tall, fair-haired, pure-blooded Slavs; the merchants and manufacturers, almost exclusively Jews and Germans; and the peasantry, the populace—a short, thick-set, swarthy race, of Slavic origin, no doubt, and speaking a Slavic tongue, but with most of the Slavic characteristics obliterated by admixture with the Turk.... Your true Slav peasant, with his mild blue eyes and his trustful spirit, is as meek and as long-suffering as a dumb beast of burden. But your black-browed Monterossan, your Tchermnogorets, is fierce, lawless, resentful, and vindictive, a Turk’s grandson, the Turk’s first cousin: though no one detests the Turk more cordially than he.”
“Well, at Vescova, and, with diminishing force, throughout all Monterosso, Queen Anéli is entirely misunderstood and sullenly misliked. Her husband cannot be called precisely the idol of his people, either; but he is regarded with indulgence, even with hopefulness; he is a Monterossan, a Pavelovitch: he may turn out well yet. Anéli, on the contrary, is an alien, a German, aNiemkashka. The feeling against her begins with the nobility. Save the half-dozen who are about her person, almost every mother’s son or daughter of them fancies that he or she has been rudely treated by her, and quite frankly hates her. I am afraid, indeed, they have some real cause of grievance; for they are most of them rather tedious, and provincial, and narrow-minded; and they bore her terribly when they come to Court; and when she is bored, as we have seen, she is likely to show it pretty plainly. So they say she gives herself airs. They pretend that when she isn’t absent-minded and monosyllabic, she is positively snappish. They denounce her as vain, shallow-pated, and extravagant. They twist and torture every word she speaks, and everything she does, into subject-matter for unfriendly criticism; and they quote as from her lips a good many words that she has never spoken, and they blame her savagely for innumerable things that she has never thought of doing. But that’s the trouble with the fierce light that beats upon a throne—it shows the gaping multitude so much more than is really there. Why, I have been assured by at least a score of Monterossan ladies that the Queen’s lovely brown hair is a wig; that her exquisite little teeth are the creation of Dr. Evans, of Paris; that whenever anything happens to annoy her, she bursts out with torrents of the most awful French oaths; that she quite frequently slaps and pinches her maids-of-honour; and that, as for her poor husband, he gets his hair pulled and his face scratched as often as he and she have the slightest difference of opinion. Monterossan ladies have gravely asseverated these charges to me (these, and others more outrageous, which I won’t repeat), whilst their Monterossan lords nodded confirmation. It matters little that the charges are preposterous. Give a Queen a bad name, and nine people in ten will believe she merits it.
“Anyhow, the nobility of Monterosso, quite frankly hating Queen Anéli, give her every bad name they can discover in their vocabularies; and the populace, the mob, without stopping to make original investigations, have convicted her on faith, and watch her with sullen captiousness and mislike. When she drives abroad, scarcely a hat is doffed, never a cheer is raised. On the contrary, one sometimes hears mutterings and muffled groans; and the glances the passers-by direct at her are, in the main, the very reverse of affectionate glances. Members of the shop-keeping class alone show a certain tendency to speak up for her, because she spends her money pretty freely; but the shop-keeping class are aliens too, and don’t count—or, rather, they count against her, ’the dogs of Jews,’ thezhudovskwy sobakwy!”
But do you imagine Queen Anéli minds? Do you imagine she is hurt, depressed, disappointed? Not she. She accepts her unpopularity with the most superb indifference. “What do you suppose I care for the opinion of such riff-raff?” I recollect her once crying out, with curling lip. “Any one who has the least individuality, the least character, the least fineness, the least originality—any one who is in the least degree natural, unconventional, spontaneous—is bound to be misconceived and caluminated by the vulgar rank and file. It’s the meanness and stupidity of average human nature; it’s the proverbial injustice of men. To be popular, you must either be utterly insignificant, a complete nonentity, or else a timeserver and a hypocrite. So long as I have a clear conscience of my own, I don’t care a button what strangers think and say about me. I don’t intend to allow my conduct to be influenced in the tiniest particular by the prejudices of outsiders. Meddlers, busybodies! I will live my own life, and those who don’t like it may do their worst. I will be myself.”
“Yes, my dear; but after all,” the King reminded her, “one has, in this imperfect world, to make certain compromises with one’s environment, for comfort’s sake. One puts on extra clothing in winter, for example, however much, on abstract principles, one may despise such a gross, material, unintelligent thing as the weather. Just so, don’t you think, one is by way of having a smoother time of it, in the long run, if one takes a few simple measures to conciliate the people amongst whom one is compelled to live? Now, for instance, if you would give an hour or two every day to learning Monterossan....
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t beginthatrengaine,” cried her Majesty. “I’ve told you a hundred million times that I won’t be bothered learning Monterossan.”
It is one of her subjects’ sorest points, by the bye, that she has never condescended to learn their language. When she was first married, indeed, she announced her intention of studying it. Grammars and dictionaries were bought; a Professor was nominated; and for almost a week the Crown Princess (Krolevna), as she then was, did little else than grind at Monterossan. Her Professor was delighted; he had never known such a zealous pupil. Her husband was a little anxious. “You mustn’t work too hard, my dear. An hour or two a day should be quite enough.” But she answered, “Let me alone. It interests me.” And for almost a week she was at it early and late, with hammer and tongs; poring over the endless declensions of Monterossan nouns, the endless conjugations of Monterossan verbs; wrestling,sotto voce, with the tongue-tangling difficulties of Monterossan pronunciation; or, with dishevelled hair and inky fingers, copying long Monterossan sentences into her exercise book. She is not the sort of person who does things by halves.—And then, suddenly, she turned volte-face; abandoned the enterprise for ever. “It’s idiotic,” she exclaimed. “A language with thirty-seven letters in its alphabet, and no literature! Why should I addle my brains trying to learn it? Ah, bien, merci! I’ll content myself with French and English. It’s bad enough, in one short life, to have had to learn German, when I was a child.”
And neither argument nor entreaty could induce her to recommence it. The King, who has never altogether resigned himself to her determination, seizes from time to time an opportunity to hark back to it; but then he is silenced, as we have seen, with a “don’t beginthatrengaine.” The disadvantages that result from her ignorance, it must be noticed, are chiefly moral; it offends Monterossan amour-propre. Practically, she does perfectly well with French, that being the Court language of the realm.
No, Queen Anéli doesn’t care a button. She tosses her head, and accepts “the proverbial injustice of men” with magnificent unconcern. Only, sometimes, when the public sentiment against her takes the form of aggressive disrespect, or when it interferes in any way with her immediate convenience, it puts her a little out of patience—when, for instance, the traffic in the street retards the progress of her carriage, and a passage isn’t cleared for her as rapidly as it might be for a Queen whom the rabble loved; or when, crossing the pavement on foot, to enter a church, or a shop, or what not, the idlers that collect to look, glare at her sulkily, without doing her the common courtesy of lifting their hats. In such circumstances, I dare say, she is more or less angered. At all events, a sudden fire will kindle in her eyes, a sudden colour in her cheeks; she will very likely tap nervously with her foot, and murmur something about “canaille.” Perhaps anger, though, is the wrong word for her emotion; perhaps it should be more correctly called a kind of angry contempt.
When I first came to Vescova, some years ago, the Prime Minister and virtual dictator of the country was still M. Tsargradev, the terrible M. Tsargradev,—or Sargradeff, as most English newspapers write his name,—and it was during my visit here that his downfall occurred, his downfall and irretrievable disgrace.
The character and career of M. Tsargradev would furnish the subject for an extremely interesting study. The illegitimate son of a Monterossan nobleman, by a peasant mother, he inherited the unprepossessing physical peculiarities of his mother’s stock: the sallow skin, the broad face, the flat features, the prominent cheek-bones, the narrow, oblique-set, truculent black eyes, the squat, heavy figure. But to these he united a cleverness, an energy, an ambition, which are as foreign to simple as to gentle Monterossan blood, and which he doubtless owed to the fusion of the two; and an unscrupulousness, a perfidy, a cruelty, and yet a superficial urbanity, that are perhaps not surprising in an ambitious politician, half an Oriental, who has got to carry the double handicap of a repulsive personal appearance and a bastard birth. Now, the Government of Monterosso, as the King has sometimes been heard to stigmatise it, is deplorably constitutional. By the Constitution of 1869, practically the whole legislative power is vested in the Soviete, a parliament elected by the votes of all male subjects who have completed three years of military service. And, in the early days of the reign of Theodore IV., M. Tsargradev was leader of the Soviete, with a majority of three to one at his back.
This redoubtable personage stood foremost in the ranks of those whom our fiery little Queen Anéli “could not endure.”
“His horrible soapy smile! His servile, insinuating manner! It makes you feel as if he were plotting your assassination,” she declared. “His voice—ugh! It’s exactly like lukewarm oil. He makes my flesh creep, like some frightful, bloated reptile.”
“There was a Queen in Thule,” hummed Florimond, “who had a marvellous command of invective. ’Eaving help your reputation, if you fell under her illustrious displeasure.”
“I don’t see why you make fun of me. I’m sure you think as I do—that he’s a monster of low cunning, and cynicism, and craft, and treachery, and everything that’s vile and revolting. Don’t you?” the Queen demanded.
“To be sure I do, ma’am. I think he’s a bold, bad, dreadful person. I lie awake half the night, counting up his iniquities in my mind. And if just now I laughed, it was only to keep from crying.”
“This sort of talk is all very well,” put in the King; “but the fact remains that Tsargradev is the master of Monterosso. He could do any one of us an evil turn at any moment. He could cut down our Civil List to-morrow, or even send us packing, and establish republic. We’re dependent for everything upon his pleasure. I think, really, my dear, you ought to try to be decent to him—if only for prudence’ sake.”
“Decent to him!” echoed her Majesty. “I like that! As if I didn’t treat him a hundred million times better than he deserves! I hope he can’t complain that I’m not decent to him.”
“You’re not exactly effusive, do you think? I don’t mean that you stick your tongue out at him, or throw things at his head. But trust him for understanding. It’s what you leave unsaid and undone, rather than what you say or do. He’s fully conscious of the sort of place he occupies in your esteem, and he resents it. He thinks you distrust him, suspect him, look down upon him....”
“Well, and so I do,” interrupted the Queen. “And so do you. And so does everybody who has any right feeling.”
“Yes; but those of us who are wise in our generation keep our private sentiments regarding him under lock and key. We remember his power, and treat him respectfully to his face, however much we may despise him in secret. What’s the use of quarrelling with our bread and butter? We should seek to propitiate him, to rub him the right way.”
“Then you would actually like me togrovel, totoady, to a disgusting little low-born, black-hearted cad like Tsargradev!” cried the Queen, with scorn.
“Oh, dear me, no,” protested her husband. “But there’s a vast difference between toadying, and being a little tactful, a little diplomatic. I should like you to treat him with something more than bare civility.”
“Well, what can I do that I don’t do?”
“You never ask him to any but your general public functions, your State receptions, and that sort of thing. Why don’t you admit him to your private circle sometimes? Why don’t you invite him to your private parties, your dinners?”
“Ah, merci, non! My private parties are my private parties. I ask my friends, I ask the people I like. Nothing could induce me to ask that horrid little underbred mongrel creature. He’d be—he’d be like—like something unclean—something murky and contaminating—in the room. He’d be like an animal, an ape, a satyr.”
“Well, my dear,” the King submitted meekly, “I only hope we’ll never have cause to repent your exclusion of him. I know he bears us a grudge for it, and he’s not a person whose grudges are to be made light of.”
“Bah! I’m not afraid of him,” Anéli retorted. “I know he hates me. I see it every time he looks at me, with his snaky little eyes, his forced little smile—that awful, complacent, ingratiating smirk of his, that shows his teeth, and isn’t even skin deep; a mere film spread over his face, like pomatum! Oh, I know he hates me. But it’s the nature of mean, false little beasts like him to hate their betters; so it can’t be helped. For the rest, he may do his worst. I’m not afraid,” she concluded airily.
Not only would she take no steps to propitiate M. Tsargradev, but she was constantly urging her husband to dismiss him.
“I’m perfectly certain he has all sorts of dreadful secret vices. I haven’t the least doubt he’s murdered people. I’m sure he steals. I’m sure he has a secret understanding with Berlin, and accepts bribes to manage the affairs of Monterosso as Prince Bismarck wishes. That’s why we’re more or less in disgrace with our natural allies, Russia and France. Because Tsargradev is paid to pursue, an anti-Russian, a German, policy. If you would take my advice, you’d dismiss him, and have him put in prison. Then you could explain to the Soviete that he is a murderer, a thief, a traitor, and a monster of secret immorality, and appoint a decent person in his place.”
Her husband laughed with great amusement.
“You don’t appear quite yet to have mastered the principles of constitutional government, my dear. I could no more dismiss Tsargradev than you could dismiss the Pope of Rome.”
“Are you or are you not the King of Monterosso?”
“I’m Vice-King, perhaps. You’re the King, you know. But that has nothing to do with it. Tsargradev is leader of the Soviete. The Soviete pays the bills, and its leader governs. The King’s a mere fifth wheel. Some day they’ll abolish him. Meanwhile they tolerate him, on the understanding that he’s not to interfere.”
“You ought to be ashamed to say so. You ought to take the law and the Constitution and everything into your own hands. If you asserted yourself, they’d never dare to resist you. But you always submit—submit—submit. Of course, everybody takes advantage of a man who always submits. Show that you have some spirit, some sense of your own dignity. Order Tsargradev’s dismissal and arrest. You can do it now, at once, this evening. Then to-morrow you can go down to the Soviete, and tell them what a scoundrel he is—a thief, a murderer, a traitor, an impostor, a libertine, everything that’s foul and bad. And tell them that henceforward you intend to be really King, and not merely nominally King; and that you’re going to govern exactly as you think best; and that, if they don’t like that, they will have to make the best of it. If they resist, you can dissolve them, and order a general election. Or you can suspend the Constitution, and govern without any Soviete at all.”
The King laughed again.
“I’m afraid the Soviete might ask for a little evidence, a few proofs, in support of my sweeping charges. I could hardly satisfy them by declaring that I had my wife’s word for it. But, seriously, you exaggerate. Tsargradev is anything you like from the point of view of abstract ethics, but he’s not a criminal. He hasn’t the faintest motive for doing anything that isn’t in accordance with the law. He’s simply a vulgar, self-seeking politician, with a touch of the Tartar. But he’s not a thief, and I imagine his private life is no worse than most men’s.”
“Wait, wait, only wait!” cried the Queen. “Time will show. Some day he’ll come to grief, and then you’ll see that he’s even worse than I have said. Ifeel, Iknow, he’s everything that’s bad. Trust a woman’s intuitions. They’re much better than what you callevidence.”
And she had a nickname for him, which, as well as her general criticisms of his character, had pretty certainly reached the Premier’s ear; for, as subsequent events demonstrated, very nearly every servant in the Palace was a spy in his pay. She called him the nain jaune.
Subsequent events have also demonstrated that her woman’s intuitions were indeed trustworthy. Perhaps you will remember the revelations that were made at the time of M. Tsargradev’s downfall; fairly full reports of them appeared in the London papers. Murder, peculation, and revolting secret debaucheries were all, surely enough, proved against him. It was proved that he was the paid agent of Berlin; it was proved that he had had recourse totorturein dealing with certain refractory witnesses in his famous prosecution of Count Osaréki. And then, there was the case of Colonel Alexandrevitch. He and Tsargradev, at sunset, were strolling arm-in-arm in the Dunayskiy Prospekt, when the Colonel was shot by some person concealed in the shrubberies, who was never captured. Tsargradev and his friends broached the theory, which gained pretty general acceptance, that the shot had been intended for the Prime Minister himself, and that the death of Colonel Alexandrevitch was an accident due to bad aiming. It is now perfectly well established that the death of the Colonel was due to very good aiming indeed; that the assassin was M. Tsargradev’s own hireling; and that perhaps the best reason why the police could never lay hands on him had some connection with the circumstance that the poor wretch, that very night, was strangled and cast into the Danube.
Oh, they manage these things in a highly unlikely and theatrical manner, in the far south-east of Europe!
But the particular circumstances of M. Tsargradev’s downfall were amusingly illustrative of the character of the Queen.Ce que femme veult, Dieu le veult.And though her husband talked of the Constitution, and pleaded the necessity of evidence, Anéli was unconvinced. To get rid of Tsargradev, by one method or another, was her fixed idea, her determined purpose; she bided her time, and in the end she accomplished it.