The Illustrious Prince Part 35

So far from avoiding her, he came over to her side directly he had greeted his hostess.

"This morning," he said, "I heard some good news. You are to be a fellow guest at Devenham."

"I am afraid," she admitted, "that of my two aunts I impose most frequently upon the one where my claims are the slightest. The d.u.c.h.ess is so good-natured."

"She is charming," the Prince declared. "I am looking forward to my visit immensely. I think I am a little weary of London. A visit to the country seems to me most delightful. They tell me, too, that your spring gardens are wonderful. What London suffers from, I think, at this time of the year, is a lack of flowers. We want something to remind us that the spring is coming, besides these occasional gleams of blue sky and very occasional bursts of suns.h.i.+ne."

"You are a sentimentalist, Prince," she declared, smiling.

"No, I think not," he answered seriously. "I love all beautiful things.

I think that there are many men as well as women who are like that.

Shall I be very rude and say that in the matter of climate and flowers one grows, perhaps, to expect a little more in my own country."

An uncontrollable impulse moved her. She leaned a little towards him.

"Climate and flowers only?" she murmured. "What about the third essential?"

"Miss Penelope," he said under his breath, "I have to admit that one must travel further afield for Heaven's greatest gift. Even then one can only wors.h.i.+p. The stars are denied to us."

The d.u.c.h.ess came sailing over to them.

"Every one is here," she said. "I hope that you are all hungry. After lunch, Prince, I want you to speak to General Sherrif. He has been dying to meet you, to talk over your campaign together in Manchuria. There's another man who is anxious to meet you, too,--Professor Spenlove. He has been to j.a.pan for a month, and thinks about writing a book on your customs. I believe he looks to you to correct his impressions."

"So long as he does not ask me to correct his proofs!" the Prince murmured.

"That is positively the most unkind thing I have ever heard you say,"

the d.u.c.h.ess declared. "Come along, you good people. Jules has promised me a new omelet, on condition that we sit down at precisely half-past one. If we are five minutes late, he declines to send it up."

They took their places at the round table which had been reserved for the d.u.c.h.ess of Devenham,--not very far, Penelope remembered, from the table at which they had sat for dinner a little more than a fortnight ago. The recollection of that evening brought her a sudden realization of the tragedy which seemed to have taken her life into its grip. Again the Prince sat by her side. She watched him with eyes in which there was a gleam sometimes almost of horror. Easy and natural as usual, with his pleasant smile and simple speech, he was making himself agreeable to one of the older ladies of the party, to whom, by chance, no one had addressed more than a word or so. It was always the same--always like this, she realized, with a sudden keen apprehension of this part of the man's nature. If there was a kindness to be done, a thoughtful action, it was not only he who did it but it was he who first thought of it. The papers during the last few days had been making public an incident which he had done his best to keep secret. He had signalized his arrival in London, some months ago, by going overboard from a police boat into the Thames to rescue a half-drunken lighterman, and when the Humane Society had voted him their medal, he had accepted it only on condition that the presentation was private and kept out of the papers. It was not one but fifty kindly deeds which stood to his credit. Always with the manners of a Prince--gracious, courteous, and genial--never a word had pa.s.sed his lips of evil towards any human being. The barriers today between the smoking room and the drawing room are shadowy things, and she knew very well that he was held in a somewhat curious respect by men, as a person to whom it was impossible to tell a story in which there was any shadow of indelicacy. The ways of the so-called man of world seemed in his presence as though they must be the ways of some creature of a different and a lower stage of existence. A young man whom he had once corrected had christened him, half jestingly, Sir Galahad, and certainly his life in London, a life which had to bear all the while the test of the limelight, had appeared to merit some such t.i.tle. These thoughts chased one another through her mind as she looked at him and marvelled. Surely those other things must be part of a bad nightmare! It was not possible that such a man could be a.s.sociated with wrong-doing--such manner of wrong-doing!

Even while these thoughts pa.s.sed through her brain, he turned to talk to her, and she felt at once that little glow of pleasure which the sound of his voice nearly always evoked.

"I am looking forward so much," he said, "to my stay at Devenham. You know, it will not be very much longer that I shall have the opportunity of accepting such invitations."

"You mean that the time is really coming when we shall lose you?" she asked suddenly.

"When my work is finished, I return home," he answered. "I fancy that it will not be very long now."

"When you do leave England," she asked after a moment's pause, "do you go straight to j.a.pan?"

He bowed.

"With the Continent I have finished," he said. "The cruiser which His Majesty has sent to fetch me waits even now at Southampton."

"You speak of your work," she remarked, "as though you had been collecting material for a book."

He smiled.

"I have been busy collecting information in many ways," he said,--"trying to live your life and feel as you feel, trying to understand those things in your country, and in other countries too, which seem at first so strange to us who come from the other side of the East."

"And the end of it all?" she asked.

His eyes gleamed for a moment with a light which she did not understand.

His smile was tolerant, even genial, but his face remained like the face of a sphinx.

"It is for the good of j.a.pan I came," he said, "for her good that I have stayed here so long. At the same time it has been very pleasant. I have met with great kindness."

She leaned a little forward so as to look into his face. The impa.s.sivity of his features was like a wall before her.

"After all," she said, "I suppose it is a period of probation. You are like a schoolboy already who is looking forward to his holidays. You will be very happy when you return."

"I shall be very happy indeed," he admitted simply. "Why not? I am a true son of j.a.pan, and, for every true son of his country, absence from her is as hard a thing to be borne as absence from one's own family."

Somerfield, who was sitting on her other side, insisted at last upon diverting her attention.

"Penelope," he declared, lowering his voice a little, "it isn't fair.

You never have a word to say to me when the Prince is here."

She smiled.

"You must remember that he is going away very soon, Charlie," she reminded him.

"Good job, too!" Somerfield muttered, sotto voce.

"And then," Penelope continued, with the air of not having heard her companion's last remark, "he possesses also a very great attraction. He is absolutely unlike any other human being I ever met or heard of."

Somerfield glanced across at his rival with lowering brows.

"I've nothing to say against the fellow," he remarked, "except that it seems queer nowadays to run up against a man of his birth who is not a sportsman,--in the sense of being fond of sport, I mean," he corrected himself quickly.

"Sometimes I wonder," Penelope said thoughtfully, "whether such speeches as the one which you have just made do not indicate something totally wrong in our modern life. You, for instance, have no profession, Charlie, and you devote your life to a systematic course of what is nothing more or less than pleasure-seeking. You hunt or you shoot, you play polo or golf, you come to town or you live in the country, entirely according to the seasons. If any one asked you why you had not chosen a profession, you would as good as tell them that it was because you were a rich man and had no need to work for your living. That is practically what it comes to. You Englishmen work only if you need money. If you do not need money, you play. The Prince is wealthy, but his profession was ordained for him from the moment when he left the cradle. The end and aim of his life is to serve his country, and I believe that he would consider it sacrilege if he allowed any slighter things to divert at any time his mind from its main purpose. He would feel like a priest who has broken his ordination vows."

"That's all very well," Somerfield said coolly, "but there's nothing in life nowadays to make us quite so strenuous as that."

"Isn't there?" Penelope answered. "You are an Englishman, and you should know. Are you convinced, then, that your country today is at the height of her prosperity, safe and sound, bound to go on triumphant, prosperous, without the constant care of her men?"

Somerfield looked up at her in growing amazement.

"What on earth's got hold of you, Penelope?" he asked. "Have you been reading the sensational papers, or stuffing yourself up with jingoism, or what?"

She laughed.

"None of those things, I can a.s.sure you," she said. "A man like the Prince makes one think, because, you see, every standard of life we have is a standard of comparison. When one sees the sort of man he is, one wonders. When one sees how far apart he is from you Englishmen in his ideals and the way he spends his life, one wonders again."

Somerfield shrugged his shoulders.

"We do well enough," he said. "j.a.pan is the youngest of the nations. She has a long way to go to catch us up."

"We do well enough!" she repeated under her breath. "There was a great city once which adopted that as her motto,--people dig up mementoes of her sometimes from under the sands."