A Son of the Immortals by Louis Tracy (books for 7th graders txt) π
"You have chosen the only good bit in the painting," he declared stoutly. "Look at the boy's lips. Caravaggio must have modeled them from a girl's. What business has a fellow with pouting red lips like them to wear a sword on his thigh?"
Joan laughed with joyousness that was good to hear.
"Pooh! Run away and smite that ball with a long stick!" she said.
"Hum! More than the Italian could have done."
He was ridiculously in earnest. Joan colored suddenly and busied herself with tubes of paint. She believed he was jealous of the handsome Lombard. She began to mix some pigments on the palette. Delgrado, already regretting an inexplicable outburst, turned from the picture and looked at Murillo's "woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a diadem of twelve stars."
"Now, please help me to appreciate that and you will find me a willing student," he murmured.
But Joan had recovered her self-possession. "Suppose we come off the h
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A white despairing face became visible for a moment, and a choking voice cried, "Save me, your Majesty! I am John Sobieski!"
"Sobieski!" thought Alec, ordering his carriage to stop and alighting quickly. "That is the Polish hotel waiter of whom Felix spoke to me some few days ago. He said the man had done his best to bring assistance; but his efforts were frustrated by some stupid blunder here, and he thought something ought to be done for him. I promised to attend to it; but the thing slipped my mind."
By this time he had reached the policeman, who, assisted by a soldier, was dragging the protesting waiter to the guardroom.
"Release that man!" he said.
The man saluted, and the trembling Sobieski fell on his knees on the pavement.
"Oh, get up," said the King, who felt a special aversion to such a display of abasement. "Recover your wits, man, and tell me what you want!"
"I ask protection, your Majesty," murmured the desperate Sobieski. "My life is in danger. I came here to see Monsieur Poluski; but they told me he was not at home. I have been turned out of my situation; so I have nowhere to go. If I am found wandering in the streets to-night, I shall be killed."
"At any rate, you seem to be thoroughly frightened," cried Alec with a reassuring smile. "Take charge of him," he said to the pandur, "and have him sent to my bureau in five minutes!"
The bureau in question was that apartment on the first floor overlooking the courtyard, in which Alec had preferred his claim to the throne of Kosnovia to the perplexed President of the embryo Republic. It was there, too, that Felix Poluski had spoken those plain words to Prince Michael Delgrado, and its situation was so convenient for the King's daily comings and goings that he had utilized it temporarily as an office and private audience chamber.
At the top of the stairs he happened to catch sight of Pauline, Joan's staid looking maid. Though he obtained only a casual glimpse of her, he fancied that she was distressed about something, and it occurred to him after he was in the room and the door was closed that perhaps she wished to give him a message. Bosko, the taciturn Albanian whom he had now definitely appointed as his confidential attendant, was standing near the table with a bundle of documents that demanded the King's signature.
Realizing that the Frenchwoman would meet Bosko in a minute or two when he went out with the signed papers, and could then make known her wish to speak to the King if such was her intention, Alec bent over the table and began to peruse several departmental decrees hurriedly. He made it a rule never to append his name to any State paper without mastering its contents, and one of the palace guards brought in Sobieski before Alec had concluded his self imposed task. As it happened, the various items were mere formalities, and when he wrote "Alexis R." for the last time, Bosko and the soldier left the room, and the frightened little Pole found himself alone with the King.
"Now," said Alec kindly, "tell me what you want and why you are so afraid?"
Sobieski at once plunged into a rambling statement. He spoke the Kosnovian language with the fluent inaccuracy of his class; but Alec's alert ears had no difficulty in following his meaning. His story was that several customers of the cafΓ© had denounced him to the proprietor as a spy in the King's service, while some of them went so far as to charge him with responsibility for the deaths of those thirty-one heroes of the Seventh Regiment whose bodies had been found on the stairs and first floor landing of the hotel. His master had no option but to discharge him, and Sobieski felt that he had good reason to fear that his life was in danger. Alec pooh-poohed the notion; but the timid little waiter was so woebegone that the King pitied him.
"Tell me exactly what you did on the day of the revolt," he said. "You came here, I understand. How was it that no one listened to you?"
"Oh, they did, your Majesty," protested Sobieski. "Your Majesty's own father brought me into the hall and kept me there nearly five minutes. He did not believe a word I said, and was very angry with me for bringing such an alarming story to the palace. At last, by good fortune, Monsieur Nesimir appeared; but even then I should have been taken away in custody if Monsieur Poluski had not caused me to be released."
Despite its sinister significance, Alec could not choose but credit this amazing statement. He wondered why Felix had not told him the facts in detail afterward; but he knew that the hunchback's mind worked in strange grooves, and it was probable that his silence was dictated by some powerful motive. In any event, the incident was an unpleasant reminder of certain nebulous doubts that he had striven to crush, and it was better that this scared rabbit of a man should not remain in Delgratz and become the victim of some vendetta which might bring the whole odd story into prominence.
"You want to leave the city, I take it?" said he after a thoughtful pause, in which he took a slow turn up and down the room.
"I dare not remain here any longer, your Majesty. I came to-night to ask Monsieur Poluski to be good enough to give me money to take me to Warsaw."
"I think," said Alec, smiling, "he promised you, in my name, the wherewithal to buy a cafΓ©."
"I fear I did not earn my reward, your Majesty," stuttered the other.
"Are cafΓ©s dear in Warsaw?" said the King, unlocking a drawer and producing roubles to the equivalent of five hundred dollars. "Here, this sum should give you a fresh start in life. All I ask in return is that you shall keep a still tongue about your recent share in local events."
Poor Sobieski's gratitude grew incoherent, especially when the King handed him over to the care of the attendant who had brought him to the bureau, with instructions that he was to be taken to the railway station and safeguarded there till the departure of the next train that crossed the frontier.
By that time the dinner hour was long past. Alec was disinclined for a heavy meal; so he went to his private suite, where he changed his clothes, contenting himself with some sandwiches, which he ate in a hurry and washed down with a glass of red wine.
Coming down stairs about an hour later, he passed the smoking-room. The door was open, and he saw that the men had already ended dinner. He was about to enter the music salon, to which his mother and Joan usually retired with the President's wife and daughter, when he met Pauline for the second time, and the Frenchwoman now approached him with the same marked nervousness in her demeanor that he had noticed when he saw her standing in the lobby.
"May I have a word with your Majesty in private?" she asked.
He was surprised; but again he believed she was probably bringing a message from Joan. He threw open the door of his office. "Come in here," he said. "What is it?"
She held out a letter, and he saw that her hand shook. "Mademoiselle asked me to give you this, your Majesty," she said. "I was to take care that you were alone when you received it."
"Something important then," he said with a laugh.
Crossing the room to the table on which stood the lamp by whose light he had scribbled "Alexis R." on the papers intrusted to Bosko, he opened the envelop, which bore in Joan's handwriting the simple superscription, "Alec," and began to read:
My Dear One:βWhen Pauline gives you this, I shall have left you forever. I am going from Delgratz, and I shall never see you again. I cannot marry youβbut oh, my dear, my dear, I shall love you all my life! Try and forget me. I am acting for the best. Do not write to Paris or endeavor to find me. If it is God's will, we shall never meet again. I can scarcely see what I am writing for my tears. So good-by, my Alec! Be brave! Forgive me, and, in the years to come, try to forget our few days of happiness together.
He stood there stricken, almost paralyzed with the suddenness of the blow, wondering dumbly why Joan's hand should have inflicted it. The frightened Frenchwoman dared not speak or move. She watched him with that impersonal fear so readily aroused in one of her class by the terrifying spectacle of a strong man in his agony. At last he moved listlessly, as though his limbs had just been released from the rack. He held the letter under the lamp again and read it a second time, word for word. He seemed to be forcing himself to accept it as truth. This young King, so valiant, so resourceful, so prompt in action and judgment, could devise no plan, no means of rescue from the abyss. After an interval that neither the man nor the woman could measure, he turned his strained, staring eyes on the shrinking Pauline.
"Have I ever done you any harm?" he said in the low voice of utmost despair.
"Me, monsieur?" she gasped. "You harm me? No, indeed, I was only too proud to think my dear mistress should have won such a husband."
"Then you will answer my questions truly," he went on, his eyes devouring the woman's homely features as though he would fain seek some comfort therein.
"Oh yes, indeed, monsieur. Ask me anything. It is not that I have much to tell. Mademoiselle said, 'Give this letter to the King himself. Let it touch no other hand.' That is all, monsieur. She was weeping when she wrote it. Monsieur Poluski told me what to do to-morrow about my own journey. See, here are my tickets."
"Poluski!" said Alec, and the words came dully. "Has he too betrayed me?"
"He has gone with my mistress," sobbed Pauline. "It is not that they have betrayed you, monsieur; for mademoiselle looked like to die, and I have never seen any one more disturbed than Monsieur Poluski. He raved like a maniac when I asked him for one word of explanation."
"But what does it mean, woman? Do you understand what has happened? My promised wife has fled, bidding me not to dream of seeing her again, and with her has gone one of the few men alive in whom I had confidence. What is that but betrayal?"
"I do not profess to understand the ways of courts, monsieur," said Pauline, gathering a little courage, since the King appealed to her as a fellow mortal. "But in your case I do not think I should blame Mademoiselle Joan. She did not go because she had ceased to love you, monsieur. Sometimes a woman can love a man so well that she will leave him if she thinks it is for his good."
A light broke in on the darkness. Was Joan the victim of some deadly intrigue such as had sullied too often the records of the Kosnovian monarchy? How strange it was that he should come from that eventful meeting of the Cabinet and receive within the hour Joan's pathetic message of farewell! He stood and thought deeply again for many minutes, striving to conquer his laboring heart and throbbing brain, exerting manfully all his splendid resources of mind and body. Then he turned to the trembling Frenchwoman and said with almost uncanny gentleness:
"You
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