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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] bustle about it like a caged canary, and not ever to falter in your hilarity, is heroic. Let us, by all means, not consider the obdurate if gilded barriers, but rather the lettuce and the cuttlebone. I have my choice between becoming a corpse or a convicta convict? ah, undoubtedly a convict, sentenced to serve out a life term in a cesspool of castby superstitions." He smiled now over Paul Vanderhoffen's rage. "Since the situation is tragic, let us approach it in an appropriate spirit of frivolity. My circumstances bully me. And I succumb to irrationality, as rational persons invariably end by doing. But, oh, dear me! oh, Osiris, Termagaunt, and Zeus! to think there are at least a dozen other ne'erdowells alive who would prefer to make a mess of living as a grandduke rather than as a scribbler in Grub Street! Well, well! the jest is not of my contriving, and the one concession a sane man will never yield the universe is that of considering it seriously." And he strode on, resolved to be Prince Fribble to the last. "Frivolity," he said, "is the smoked glass through which a civilized person views the only world he has to live in. For, otherwise, he could not presume to look upon such coruscations of insanity and remain unblinded." This heartened him, as a rounded phrase will do the best of us. But byandbye, "Frivolity," he groaned, "is really the cheap mask incompetence claps on when haled before a mirror." And at Leamington Manor he found her strolling upon the lawn. It was an ordered, lovely scene, steeped now in the tranquillity of evening. Above, the stars were losing diffidence. Below, and within arms' reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on which he fidgeted and stuttered. Something in his heart snapped like a fiddle string, and he was entirely aware of this circumstance. As to her eyes, teeth, coloring, complexion, brows, height and hair, it is needless to expatiate. The most painstaking inventory of these chattels would necessarily be misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him was that of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the universe, apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen. But he would be Prince Fribble to the last. And so, "Wait just a moment, Page 81 ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html please," he said, "I want to harrow up your soul and freeze your blood." Wherewith he suavely told her everything about Paul Vanderhoffen's origin and the alternatives now offered him, and she listened without comment. "Ai! ai!" young Vanderhoffen perorated; "the situation is complete. I have not the least desire to be GrandDuke of SaxeKesselberg. It is too abominably tedious. But, if I do not join in with Desmarets, who has the guyropes of a restoration well in hand, I must inevitably beremoved, as the knave phrases it. For as The Certain Hour A PRINCESS OF GRUB STREET 77 long as I live, I will be an insuperable barrier between Augustus and his Sophia. Otototoi!" he wailed, with a fine tone of tragedy, "the one impossible achievement in my life has always been to convince anybody that it was mine to dispose of as I elected!" "Oh, man proposes" she began, cryptically. Then he deliberated, and sulkily submitted: "But I may not even propose to abdicate. Augustus has put himself upon sworn record as an eyewitness of my hideous death. And in consequence I might keep on abdicating from now to the crack of doom, and the only course left open to him would be to treat me as an impostor." She replied, with emphasis, "I think your cousin is a beast!" "Ah, but the madman is in love," he pleaded. "You should not judge poor masculinity in such a state by any ordinary standards. Oh really, you don't know the Princess Sophia. She is, in sober truth, the nicest person who was ever born a princess. Why, she had actually made a mock of even that handicap, for ordinarily it is as disastrous to feminine appearance as writing books. And, oh, Lord! they will be marrying her to me, if Desmarets and I win out." Thus he forlornly ended. "The designing minx!" Miss Claridge said, dis tinctly. "Now, gracious lady, do be just a cooing pigeon and grant that when men are in love they are not any more encumbered by abstract notions about honor than if they had been womanly from birth. Come, let's be lyrical and openminded," he urged; and he added, "No, either you are in love or else you are not in love. And nothing else will matter either way. You see, if men and women had been primarily designed to be rational creatures, there would be no explanation for their being permitted to continue in existence," he lucidly explained. "And to have grasped this fact is the pith of all wisdom." "Oh, I am very wise." A glint of laughter shone in her eyes. "I would claim to be another Pythoness if only it did not sound so snaky and wriggling. So, from my tridentor was it a Triton they used to stand on? I announce that you and your Augustus are worrying yourselves grayheaded over an idiotically simple problem. Now, I disposed of it offhand when I said, `Man proposes.'" He seemed to be aware of some one who from a considerable distance was inquiring her reasons for this statement. "Because in SaxeKesselberg, as in all other German states, when a prince of the reigning house marries outside of the mediatized nobility he thereby forfeits his right of succession. It has been done any number of times. Why, don't you see, Mr. Vanderhoffen? Conceding you ever do such a thing, your cousin Augustus would become at once the legal heir. So you must marry. It is the only way, I think, to save you from regal incarceration and at the same time to reassure the Prince of Lueminsterthat creature's fatherthat you have not, and never can have, any claim which would hold good in law. Then Duke Augustus could peaceably espouse his Sophia and go on reigning And, by the way, I have seen her picture often, and if that is what [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |