He looked at her in silence for several moments.
“Dear Miss Penelope,” he said,—“may I call you that? Forgive me if I am too forward, but I hear so many of our friends—”
“You may call me that,” she interrupted softly.
“Let me remind you, then, of what we were saying a little time ago,” he went on. “You will not take offence? You will understand, I am sure. Those things that lie nearest to my heart concerning my country are the things of which I cannot speak.”
“Not even to me?” she pleaded. “I am so insignificant. Surely I do not count?”
“Miss Penelope,” he said, “you yourself are a daughter of that country of which we have been speaking.”
She was silent.
“You think, then,” she asked, “that I put my country before everything else in the world?”
“I believe,” he answered, “that you would. Your country is too young to be wholly degenerate. It is true that you are a nation of fused races—a strange medley of people, but still you are a nation. I believe that in time of stress you would place your country before everything else.”
“And therefore?” she murmured.
“And therefore,” he continued with a delightful smile, “I shall not discuss my hopes or fears with you. Or if we do discuss them,” he went on, “let us weave them into a fairy tale. Let us say that you are indeed the Daughter of All America and that I am the Son of All Japan. You know what happens in fairyland when two great nations rise up to fight?”
“Tell me,” she begged.
“Why, the Daughter of All America and the Son of All Japan stand hand in hand before their people, and as they plight their troth, all bitter feelings pass away, the shouts of anger cease, and there is no more talk of war.”
She sighed, and leaned a little towards him. Her eyes were soft and dusky, her red lips a little parted.
“But I,” she whispered, “am not the Daughter of All America.”
“Nor am I,” he answered with a sigh, “the Son of all Japan.”
There was a breathless silence. The water splashed into the basin, the music came throbbing in through the flower-hung doorways. It seemed to Penelope that she could almost hear her heart beat. The blood in her veins was dancing to the one perfect waltz. The moments passed. She drew a little breath and ventured to look at him. His face was still and white, as though, indeed, it had been carved out of marble, but the fire in his eyes was a living thing.
“We have actually been talking nonsense,” she said, “and I thought that you, Prince, were far too serious.”
“We were talking fairy tales,” he answered, “and they are not nonsense. Do not you ever read the history of your country as it was many hundreds of years ago, before this ugly thing they call civilization weakened the sinews of our race and besmirched the very face of duty? Do you not like to read of the times when life was simpler and more natural, and there was space for every man to live and grow and stretch out his hands to the skies,—every man and every woman? They call them, in your literature, the days of romance. They existed, too, in my country. It is not nonsense to imagine for a little time that the ages between have rolled away and that those days are with us?”
“No,” she answered, “it is not nonsense. But if they were?”
He raised her fingers to his lips and kissed them. The touch of his hand, the absolute delicacy of the salute itself, made it unlike any other caress she had ever known or imagined.
“The world might have been happier for both of us,” he whispered.
Somerfield, sullen and discontented, came and looked at them, moved away, and then hesitatingly returned.
“Willmott is waiting for you,” he said. “The last was my dance, and this is his.”
She rose at once and turned to the Prince.
“I think that we should go back,” she said. “Will you take me to my aunt?”
“If it must be so,” he answered. “Tell me, Miss Penelope,” he added, “may I ask your aunt or the Duchess to bring you one day to my house to see my treasures? I cannot say how long I shall remain in this country. I would like you so much to come before I break up my little home.”
“Of course we will,” she answered. “My aunt goes nowhere, but the Duchess will bring me, I am sure. Ask her when I am there, and we can agree about the day.”
He leaned a little towards her.
“Tomorrow?” he whispered.
She nodded. There were three engagements for the next day of which she took no heed.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “Come and let us arrange it with the Duchess.”
Prince Maiyo left Devenham House to find the stars paling in the sky, and the light of an April dawn breaking through the black clouds eastwards. He dismissed his electric brougham with a little wave of the hand, and turned to walk to his house in St. James’s Square. As he walked, he bared his head. After the long hours of artificially heated rooms, there was something particularly soothing about the fresh sweetness of the early spring morning. There was something, it seemed to him, which reminded him, however faintly, of the mornings in his own land,—the perfume of the flowers from the window-boxes, perhaps, the absence of that hideous roar of traffic, or the faint aromatic scent from the lime trees in the Park, heavy from recent rain. It was the quietest hour of the twenty-four,—the hour almost of dawn. The night wayfarers had passed away, the great army of toilers as yet slumbered. One sad-eyed woman stumbled against him as he walked slowly up Piccadilly. He lifted his hat with an involuntary gesture, and her laugh changed into a sob. He turned round, and emptied his pockets of silver into her hand, hurrying away quickly that his eyes might not dwell upon her face.
“A coward always,” he murmured to himself, a little wearily, for he knew where his weakness lay,—an invincible repugnance to the ugly things of life. As he passed on, however, his spirits rose again. He caught a breath of lilac scent from a closed florist’s shop. He looked up to the skies, over the housetops, faintly blue, growing clearer every moment. Almost he fancied that he looked again into the eyes of this strange girl, recalled her unexpected yet delightful frankness, which to him, with his love of abstract truth, was, after all, so fascinating. Oh, there was much to be said for this Western world!—much to be said for those whose part it was to live in it! Yet, never so much as during that brief night walk through the silent streets, did he realize how absolutely unfitted he was to be even a temporary sojourner in this vast city. What would they say of him if they knew,—of him, a breaker of their laws, a guest, and yet a sinner against all their conventions; a guest, and yet one whose hand it was which would strike them, some day or other, the great blow! What would she think of him? He wondered whether she would realize the truth, whether she would understand. Almost as he asked himself the question, he smiled. To him it seemed a strange proof of the danger in which a weaker man would stand of passing under the yoke of this hateful Western civilization. To dream of her—yes! To see her face shining upon him from every beautiful place, to feel the delight of her presence with every delicious sensation,—the warmth of the sunlight, the perfume of the blossoms he loved! There was joy in this, the joy of the artist and the lover. But to find her in his life, a real person, a daughter of this new world, whose every instinct would be at war with his—that way lay slavery! He brushed the very thought from him.
As he reached the door of his house in St. James’ Square, it opened slowly before him. He had brought his own servants from his own country, and in their master’s absence sleep was not for them. His butler spoke to him in his own language. The Prince nodded and passed on. On his study table—a curious note of modernism where everything seemed to belong to a bygone world—was a cablegram. He tore it open. It consisted of one word only. He let the thin paper fall fluttering from his fingers. So the time was fixed!
Then Soto came gliding noiselessly into the room, fully dressed, with tireless eyes but wan face,—Soto, the prototype of his master, the most perfect se
cretary and servant evolved through all the years.
“Master,” he said, “there has been trouble here. An Englishman came with this card.”
The Prince took it, and read the name of Inspector Jacks.
“Well?” he murmured.
“The man asked questions,” Soto continued. “We spoke English so badly that he was puzzled. He went away, but he will come again.”
The Prince smiled, and laid his hand almost caressingly upon the other’s shoulder.
“It is of no consequence, Soto,” he said,—“no consequence whatever.”
XIV. AN ENGAGEMENT
Table of Contents
“Your rooms, Prince, are wonderful,” Penelope said to him. “I knew that you were a man of taste, but I did not know that you were also a millionaire.”
He laughed softly.
“In my country,” he answered, “there are no millionaires. The money which we have, however, we spend, perhaps a little differently. But, indeed, none of my treasures here have cost me anything. They have come to me through more generations than I should care to reckon up. The bronze idol, for instance, upon my writing case is four hundred years old, to my certain knowledge, and my tapestries were woven when in this country your walls went bare.”
“What I admire more than anything,” the Duchess declared, “is your beautiful violet tone.”
“I am glad,” he answered, “that you like my coloring. Some people have thought it sombre. To me dark colors indoors are restful.”
“Everything about the whole place is restful,” Penelope said,—“your servants with their quaint dresses and slippered feet, your thick carpets, the smell of those strange burning leaves, and, forgive me if I say so, your closed windows. I suppose in time I should have a headache. For a little while it is delicious.”
The Prince sighed.
“Fresh air is good,” he said, “but the air that comes from your streets does not seem to me to be fresh, nor do I like the roar of your great city always in my ears. Here I cut myself off, and I feel that I can think. Duchess, you must try those preserved fruits. They come to me from my own land. I think that the secret of preserving them is not known here. You see, they are packed with rose leaves and lemon plant. There is a golden fig, Miss Penelope,—the fruit of great knowledge, the magical fruit, too, they say. Eat that and close your eyes and you can look back and tell us all the wonders of the past. That is to say,” he added with a faint smile, “if the magic works.”
“But the magic never does work,” she protested with a little sigh, “and I am not in the least interested in the past. Tell me something about the future?”
“Surely that is easier,” he answered. “Over the past we have lost our control,—what has been must remain to the end of time. The future is ours to do what we will with.”
“That sounds so reasonable,” the Duchess declared, “and it is so absolutely false. No one can do what they will with the future. It is the future which does what it will with us.”
The Prince smiled tolerantly.
“It depends a good deal, does it not,” he said, “upon ourselves? Miss Penelope is the daughter of a country which is still young, which has all its future before it, and which, has proclaimed to the world its fixed intention of controlling its own destinies. She, at any rate, should have imbibed the national spirit. You are looking at my curtains,” he added, turning to Penelope. “Let me show you the figures upon them, and I will tell you the allegory.”
He led her to the window, and explained to her for some moments the story of the faded images which represented one chapter out of the mythology of his country. And then she stopped him.
“Always,” she said, “you and I seem to be talking of things that are dead and past, or of a future which is out of our reach. Isn’t it possible to speak now and then of the present?”
“Of the actual present?” he asked softly. “Of this very moment?”
“Of this very moment, if you will,” she answered. “Your fairy tale the other night was wonderful, but it was a long way off.”
The Prince was summoned away somewhat abruptly to bid farewell to a little stream of departing guests. Today, more than ever, he seemed to belong, indeed to the world of real and actual things, for a cousin of his mother’s, a Lady Stretton-Wynne, was helping him receive his guests—his own aunt, as Penelope told herself more than once, struggling all the time with a vague incredulity. When he was able to rejoin her, she was examining a curious little coffer which stood upon an ivory table.
“Show me the mystery of this lock,” she begged. “I have been trying to open it ever since you went away. One could imagine that the secrets of a nation might be hidden here.”
He smiled, and taking the box from her hands, touched a little spring. Almost at once the lid flew open.
“I am afraid,” he said, “that it is empty.”
She peered in.
“No,” she exclaimed, “there is something there! See!” She thrust in her hand and drew out a small, curiously shaped dagger of fine blue steel and a roll of silken cord. She held them up to him.
“What are these?” she asked. “Are they symbols—the cord and the knife of destiny?”
He took them gently from her hand and replaced them in the box. She heard the lock go with a little click, and looked into his face, surprised at his silence.
“Is there anything the matter?” she asked. “Ought I not to have taken them up?”
Almost as the words left her lips, she understood. His face was inscrutable, but his very silence was ominous. She remembered a drawing in one of the halfpenny papers, the drawing of a dagger found in a horrible place. She remembered the description of that thin silken cord, and she began to tremble.
“I did not know that anything was in the box,” he said calmly. “I am sorry if its contents have alarmed you.”
She scarcely heard his words. The room seemed wheeling round with her, the floor unsteady beneath her feet. The atmosphere of the place had suddenly become horrible,—the faint odor of burning leaves, the pictures, almost like caricatures, which mocked her from the walls, the grinning idols, the strangely shaped weapons in their cases of black oak. She faltered as she crossed the room, but recovered herself.
“Aunt,” she said, “if you are ready, I think that we ought to go.”
The Duchess was more than ready. She rose promptly. The Prince walked with them to the door and handed them over to his majordomo.
“It has been so nice of you,” he said to the Duchess, “to honor my bachelor abode. I shall often think of your visit.”
“My dear Prince,” the Duchess declared, “it has been most interesting. Really, I found it hard to believe, in that charming room of yours, that we had not actually been transported to your wonderful country.”
“You are very gracious,” the Prince answered, bowing low.
Penelope’s hands were within her muff. She was talking some nonsense—she scarcely knew what, but her eyes rested everywhere save on the face of her host. Somehow or other she reached the door, ran down the steps and threw herself into a corner of the brougham. Then, for the first time, she allowed herself to look behind. The door was already closed, but between the curtains which his hands had drawn apart, Prince Maiyo was standing in the room which they had just quitted, and there was something in the calm impassivity of his white, stern face which seemed to madden her. She clenched her hands and looked away.
“Really, I was not so much bored as I had feared,” the Duchess remarked composedly. “That Stretton-Wynne woman generally gets on my nerves, but her nephew seemed to have a restraining effect upon her. She didn’t tell me more than once about her husband’s bad luck in not getting Canada, and she never even mentioned her girls. But I do think, Penelope,” she continued, “that I shall have to talk to you a little seriously. There’s the best-looking and richest young bachelor in London dying to marry you, and you won’t have a word to say to him. On the other hand, after starting by disl
iking him heartily, you are making yourself almost conspicuous with this fascinating young Oriental. I admit that he is delightful, my dear Penelope, but I think you should ask yourself whether it is quite worth while. Prince Maiyo may take home with him many Western treasures, but I do not think that he will take home a wife.”
“If you say another word to me, aunt,” Penelope exclaimed, “I shall shriek!”
The Duchess, being a woman of tact, laughed the subject away and pretended not to notice Penelope’s real distress. But when they had reached Devenham House, she went to the telephone and called up Somerfield.
“Charlie,” she said,—
“Right o’!” he interrupted. “Who is it?”
“Be careful what you are saying,” she continued, “because it isn’t any one who wants you to take them out to supper.”
“I only wish you did,” he answered. “It’s the Duchess, isn’t it?”
“The worst of having a distinctive voice,” she sighed. “Listen. I want to speak to you.”
“I am listening hard,” Somerfield answered. “Hold the instrument a little further away from you,—that’s better.”
“We have been to the Prince’s for tea this afternoon—Penelope and I,” she said.
“I know,” he assented. “I was asked, but I didn’t see the fun of it. It puts my back up to see Penelope monopolized by that fellow,” he added gloomily.
“Well, listen to what I have to say,” the Duchess went on. “Something happened there—I don’t know what—to upset Penelope very much. She never spoke a word coming home, and she has gone straight up to her room and locked herself in. Somehow or other the Prince managed to offend her. I am sure of that, Charlie!”
“I’m beastly sorry,” Somerfield answered. “I meant to say that I was jolly glad to hear it.”
The Duchess coughed.
“I didn’t quite hear what you said before,” she said severely. “Perhaps it is just as well. I rang up to say that you had better come round and dine with us tonight. You will probably find Penelope in a more reasonable frame of mind.”
21 Greatest Spy Thrillers in One Premium Edition (Mystery & Espionage Series) Page 377