My gendarmes bowed themselves out, shutting the door behind them with an ominous clangour.
“If this is my dungeon cell,” I thought, “I shall not be so uncomfortable, after all. But how preposterous of them to force me to wear my dress-suit.”
I threw myself into an easy-chair, buried my face in my hands, and tried to reflect upon my situation.
I can’t tell how much time may have passed in this way; perhaps twenty minutes or half an hour. Then, suddenly, I was disturbed by the sound of a light little cough behind me, a discreet little “ahem.” I looked up quickly. A lady had entered the apartment, and was standing in the middle of it, smiling in contemplation of my desperate attitude.
“Good heavens!” I gasped, but not audibly, as her face grew clear to my startled sight. “The Grand Duchess her self!”
“I am glad to see you, Mr. Wainwright,” her Highness began, in English. “X——— is a dull little place—oh, believe me, the dullest of its size in Christendom—and they tell me you are an amusing man. I trust they tell the truth.”
Of course the reader has foreseen it from the outset; otherwise why should I be detaining him with this anecdote? But upon me it came as a thunderbolt; and in my emotion I forgot myself, and exclaimed aloud, “Sebastian Roch!” The face of the Grand Duchess had haunted me with a sense of familiarity; the voice of my redheaded officer in the carriage had seemed not strange to me; but now that I saw the face, and heard the voice, at one and the same time, all was clear—“Sebastian Roch!”
“You said——?” the gracious lady questioned, arching her eyes.
“Nothing, madame. I was about to thank your Highness for her kindness, but——”
“But your mind wandered, and you made some irrelevant military observation about a bastion rock. It is, perhaps, aphasia.”
“Very probably,” I assented.
“But you are a man of honour, are you not?”
“I hope so.”
“The English generally are. You can keep a State secret, especially when you happen to have learned it by a sort of accident, can you not?”
“I am a tomb for such things, madame.”
“That is well. And besides, you must consider that not all homicide is murder. Sometimes one is driven to kill in self-defence.”
“I have not a doubt of that.”
“I am only sorry it should, all have happened before you saw him. His squint was a rarity; it would have pleased your sense of humour. X———is the dullest little principality,” she went on, “oh, but dull, dull, dull! I am sometimes forced in despair to perpetrate little jokes. Yet you have actually stopped here five weeks. It must be as they say, that the English people take their pleasures sadly. You are a painter, I am told.”
“Yes, your Highness; I make a shift at painting.”
“And I at fiddling. But I lack a discriminating audience. I think you had better paint my portrait. I will play my fiddle to you. Between whiles we will talk. On occasions, I may tell you, I smoke cigarettes; one must have some excitement. We will try to enliven things a little. Do you think we shall succeed?”
“Oh, I should not despair of doing so.”
“That is nice of you. I have a most ridiculous High Chancellor; you might draw caricatures of him. And my First Lady of the Chamber has a preposterous lisp. I do hope I shall be amused.”
As she spoke, she extended her left hand towards me; I took it, and was about to give it a friendly shake.
“No, no, not that,” said she. “Oh, I forgot, you are an American, and the ABC of court etiquette is Sanskrit to you. Must I tell you what to do?”
To cut a long story short, I thought my lines had fallen unto me in extremely pleasant places; and so, indeed, they had—for a while. I passed a merry summer at the Court of X———, alternating between the Residenz in town, and the Schloss beyond the walls. I made a good many preliminary studies for the princess’s portrait, whilst she played her violin; and between times, as she had promised, we talked, practised court etiquette, smoked cigarettes, and laughed at scandal. But when I began upon the final canvas, I at least had to become a little sober. I wanted to make a masterpiece of it. We had two or three sittings, during which I worked away in grim silence, and the Grand Duchess yawned.
Then one night I was again roused from the middle of my slumbers, taken in custody by a colonel of dragoons, conducted to a closed carriage, and driven abroad through the darkness. When our carriage came to a standstill we found ourselves in the Austrian village of Z————, beyond the X——— frontier There Colonel von Schlangewurtzel bade me good-bye. At the same time he handed me a letter. I hastened to tear it open. Upon a sheet of court paper, in a pretty feminine hand, I read these words.
“You promised to amuse me. But it seems you take your droll British artau grand sérieux. We have better portrait-painters among our natives; and you will find models cheap and plentiful at Z————.
“Farewell!”