Princess Aline, by Richard Harding Davis
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Richard Harding Davis >> Princess Aline, by Richard Harding Davis
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6 This etext was prepared with the use of Calera WordScan Plus 2.0
The original book seems to have been very difficult to scan.
The raw OCR output had:
lots of e --> c errors some missing open quotes " too.
(some may have been missed during proofing)
I also noted some quoted paragraphs unseparated from the previous
paragraphs, and fixed what I could find. In addition, vi reports
there are some extra binary characters, but I didn't see them.
Please advise if you find any errors. Thanks, hart@pobox.com
THE PRINCESS ALINE
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
THE PRINCESS ALINE
I
H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald came into the
life of Morton Carlton--or "Morney" Carlton, as men called
him--of New York city, when that young gentleman's affairs and
affections were best suited to receive her. Had she made her
appearance three years sooner or three years later, it is
quite probable that she would have passed on out of his life
with no more recognition from him than would have been
expressed in a look of admiring curiosity.
But coming when she did, when his time and heart were both
unoccupied, she had an influence upon young Mr. Carlton which
led him into doing several wise and many foolish things, and
which remained with him always. Carlton had reached a point
in his life, and very early in his life, when he could afford
to sit at ease and look back with modest satisfaction to what
he had forced himself to do, and forward with pleasurable
anticipations to whatsoever he might choose to do in the
future. The world had appreciated what he had done, and had
put much to his credit, and he was prepared to draw upon this
grandly.
At the age of twenty he had found himself his own master, with
excellent family connections, but with no family, his only
relative being a bachelor uncle, who looked at life from the
point of view of the Union Club's windows, and who objected to
his nephew's leaving Harvard to take up the study of art in
Paris. In that city (where at Julian's he was nicknamed the
junior Carlton, for the obvious reason that he was the older
of the two Carltons in the class, and because he was well
dressed) he had shown himself a harder worker than others who
were less careful of their appearance and of their manners.
His work, of which he did not talk, and his ambitions, of
which he also did not talk, bore fruit early, and at
twenty-six he had become a portrait-painter of international
reputation. Then the French government purchased one of his
paintings at an absurdly small figure, and placed it in the
Luxembourg, from whence it would in time depart to be buried
in the hall of some provincial city; and American
millionaires, and English Lord Mayors, members of Parliament,
and members of the Institute, masters of hounds in pink coats,
and ambassadors in gold lace, and beautiful women of all
nationalities and conditions sat before his easel. And so
when he returned to New York he was welcomed with an
enthusiasm which showed that his countrymen had feared that
the artistic atmosphere of the Old World had stolen him from
them forever. He was particularly silent, even at this date,
about his work, and listened to what others had to say of it
with much awe, not unmixed with some amusement, that it should
be he who was capable of producing anything worthy of such
praise. We have been told what the mother duck felt when her
ugly duckling turned into a swan, but we have never considered
how much the ugly duckling must have marvelled also.
"Carlton is probably the only living artist," a brother artist
had said of him, "who fails to appreciate how great his work
is." And on this being repeated to Carlton by a good-natured
friend, he had replied cheerfully, "Well, I'm sorry, but it is
certainly better to be the only one who doesn't appreciate it
than to be the only one who does."
He had never understood why such a responsibility had been
intrusted to him. It was, as he expressed it, not at all in
his line, and young girls who sought to sit at the feet of the
master found him making love to them in the most charming
manner in the world, as though he were not entitled to all the
rapturous admiration of their very young hearts, but had to
sue for it like any ordinary mortal. Carlton always felt as
though some day some one would surely come along and say:
"Look here, young man, this talent doesn't belong to you; it's
mine. What do you mean by pretending that such an idle
good-natured youth as yourself is entitled to such a gift of
genius?" He felt that he was keeping it in trust, as it were;
that it had been changed at birth, and that the proper
guardian would eventually relieve him of his treasure.
Personally Carlton was of the opinion that he should have been
born in the active days of knights-errant--to have had nothing
more serious to do than to ride abroad with a blue ribbon
fastened to the point of his lance, and with the spirit to
unhorse any one who objected to its color, or to the claims of
superiority of the noble lady who had tied it there. There
was not, in his opinion, at the present day any sufficiently
pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many lovely
women this world contained. A proposal of marriage he
considered to be a mean and clumsy substitute for the older
way, and was uncomplimentary to the many other women left
unasked, and marriage itself required much more constancy than
he could give. He had a most romantic and old-fashioned ideal
of women as a class, and from the age of fourteen had been a
devotee of hundreds of them as individuals; and though in that
time his ideal had received several severe shocks, he still
believed that the "not impossible she" existed somewhere, and
his conscientious efforts to find out whether every women he
met might not be that one had led him not unnaturally into
many difficulties.
"The trouble with me is," he said, "that I care too much to
make Platonic friendship possible, and don't care enough to
marry any particular woman--that is, of course, supposing that
any particular one would be so little particular as to be
willing to marry me. How embarrassing it would be, now," he
argued, "if, when you were turning away from the chancel after
the ceremony, you should look at one of the bridesmaids and
see the woman whom you really should have married! How
distressing that would be! You couldn't very well stop and
say: `I am very sorry, my dear, but it seems I have made a
mistake. That young woman on the right has a most interesting
and beautiful face. I am very much afraid that she is the
one.' It would be too late then; while now, in my free state,
I can continue my, search without any sense of
responsibility."
"Why"--he would exclaim--"I have walked miles to get a glimpse
of a beautiful woman in a suburban window, and time and time
again when I have seen a face in a passing brougham I have
pursued it in a hansom, and learned where the owner of the
face lived, and spent weeks in finding some one to present me,
only to discover that she was self-conscious or uninteresting
or engaged. Still I had assured myself that she was not the
one. I am very conscientious, and I consider that it is my
duty to go so far with every woman I meet as to be able to
learn whether she is or is not the one, and the sad result is
that I am like a man who follows the hounds but is never in at
the death."
"Well," some married woman would say, grimly, "I hope you will
get your deserts some day; and you WILL, too. Some day some
girl will make you suffer for this."
"Oh, that's all right," Carlton would answer, meekly. "Lots
of women have made me suffer, if that's what you think I need."
"Some day," the married woman would prophesy, "you will care
for a woman so much that you will have no eyes for any one
else. That's the way it is when one is married."
"Well, when that's the way it is with ME," Carlton would
reply, "I certainly hope to get married; but until it is, I
think it is safer for all concerned that I should not."
Then Carlton would go to the club and complain bitterly to one
of his friends.
"How unfair married women are!" he would say. "The idea of
thinking a man could have no eyes but for one woman! Suppose
I had never heard a note of music until I was twenty-five
years of age, and was then given my hearing. Do you suppose
my pleasure in music would make me lose my pleasure in
everything else? Suppose I met and married a girl at
twenty-five. Is that going to make me forget all the women I
knew before I met her? I think not. As a matter of fact, I
really deserve a great deal of credit for remaining single,
for I am naturally very affectionate; but when I see what poor
husbands my friends make, I prefer to stay as I am until I am
sure that I will make a better one. It is only fair to the
woman."
Carlton was sitting in the club alone. He had that sense of
superiority over his fellows and of irresponsibility to the
world about him that comes to a man when he knows that his
trunks are being packed and that his state-room is engaged.
He was leaving New York long before most of his friends could
get away. He did not know just where he was going, and
preferred not to know. He wished to have a complete holiday,
and to see Europe as an idle tourist, and not as an artist
with an eye to his own improvement. He had plenty of time and
money; he was sure to run across friends in the big cities,
and acquaintances he could make or not, as he pleased, en
route. He was not sorry to go. His going would serve to put
an end to what gossip there might be of his engagement to
numerous young women whose admiration for him as an artist, he
was beginning to fear, had taken on a more personal tinge. "I
wish," he said, gloomily, "I didn't like people so well. It
seems to cause them and me such a lot of trouble."
He sighed, and stretched out his hand for a copy of one of the
English illustrated papers. It had a fresher interest to him
because the next number of it that he would see would be in
the city in which it was printed. The paper in his hands was
the St. James Budget, and it contained much fashionable
intelligence concerning the preparations for a royal wedding
which was soon to take place between members of two of the
reigning families of Europe. There was on one page a
half-tone reproduction of a photograph, which showed a group
of young people belonging to several of these reigning
families, with their names and titles printed above and below
the picture. They were princesses, archdukes, or grand-dukes,
and they were dressed like young English men and women, and
with no sign about them of their possible military or social rank.
One of the young princesses in the photograph was looking out
of it and smiling in a tolerant, amused way, as though she had
thought of something which she could not wait to enjoy until
after the picture was taken. She was not posing consciously,
as were some of the others, but was sitting in a natural
attitude, with one arm over the back of her chair, and with
her hands clasped before her. Her face was full of a fine
intelligence and humor, and though one of the other princesses
in the group was far more beautiful, this particular one had a
much more high-bred air, and there was something of a
challenge in her smile that made any one who looked at the
picture smile also. Carlton studied the face for some time,
and mentally approved of its beauty; the others seemed in
comparison wooden and unindividual, but this one looked like a
person he might have known, and whom he would certainly have
liked. He turned the page and surveyed the features of the
Oxford crew with lesser interest, and then turned the page
again and gazed critically and severely at the face of the
princess with the high-bred smile. He had hoped that he would
find it less interesting at a second glance, but it did not
prove to be so.
"`The Princess Aline of Hohenwald,'" he read. "She's probably
engaged to one of those Johnnies beside her, and the
Grand-Duke of Hohenwald behind her must be her brother." He
put the paper down and went into luncheon, and diverted
himself by mixing a salad dressing; but after a few moments he
stopped in the midst of this employment, and told the waiter,
with some unnecessary sharpness, to bring him the last copy of
the St. James Budget.
"Confound it!" he added, to himself.
He opened the paper with a touch of impatience and gazed long
and earnestly at the face of the Princess Aline, who continued
to return his look with the same smile of amused tolerance.
Carlton noted every detail of her tailor-made gown, of her
high mannish collar, of her tie, and even the rings on her
hand. There was nothing about her of which he could fairly
disapprove. He wondered why it was that she could not have
been born an approachable New York girl instead of a princess
of a little German duchy, hedged in throughout her single
life, and to be traded off eventually in marriage with as much
consideration as though she were a princess of a real kingdom.
"She looks jolly too," he mused, in an injured tone; "and so
very clever; and of course she has a beautiful complexion.
All those German girls have. Your Royal Highness is more than
pretty," he said, bowing his head gravely. "You look as a
princess should look. I am sure it was one of your ancestors
who discovered the dried pea under a dozen mattresses." He
closed the paper, and sat for a moment with a perplexed smile
of consideration. "Waiter," he exclaimed, suddenly, "send a
messenger-boy to Brentano's for a copy of the St. James
Budget, and bring me the Almanach de Gotha from the library.
It is a little fat red book on the table near the window."
Then Carlton opened the paper again and propped it up against
a carafe, and continued his critical survey of the Princess
Aline. He seized the Almanach, when it came, with some
eagerness.
"Hohenwald (Maison de Grasse)," he read, and in small type
below it:
"1. Ligne cadette (regnante) grand-ducale: Hohenwald et de
Grasse.
"Guillaume-Albert-Frederick-Charles-Louis, Grand-Duc de
Hohenwald et de Grasse, etc., etc., etc."
"That's the brother, right enough," muttered Carlton.
And under the heading "Soeurs" he read:
"4. Psse Aline.--Victoria-Beatrix-Louise-Helene, Alt.
Gr.-Duc. Nee a Grasse, Juin, 1872."
"Twenty-two years old," exclaimed Carlton. "What a perfect
age! I could not have invented a better one." He looked from
the book to the face before him. "Now, my dear young lady,"
he said, "I know all about YOU. You live at Grasse, and you
are connected, to judge by your names, with all the English
royalties; and very pretty names they are, too--Aline, Helene,
Victoria, Beatrix. You must be much more English than you are
German; and I suppose you live in a little old castle, and
your brother has a standing army of twelve men, and some day
you are to marry a Russian Grand-Duke, or whoever your
brother's Prime Minister if he has a Prime Minister-decides is
best for the politics of your little toy kingdom. Ah! to
think," exclaimed Carlton, softly, "that such a lovely and
glorious creature as that should be sacrificed for so
insignificant a thing as the peace of Europe when she might
make some young man happy?"
He carried a copy of the paper to his room, and cut the
picture of the group out of the page and pasted it carefully
on a stiff piece of card-board. Then he placed it on his
dressing-table, in front of a photograph of a young woman in a
large silver frame-which was a sign, had the young woman but
known it, that her reign for the time being was over.
Nolan, the young Irishman who "did for" Carlton, knew better
than to move it when he found it there. He had learned to
study his master since he had joined him in London, and
understood that one photograph in the silver frame was
entitled to more consideration than three others on the
writing-desk or half a dozen on the mantel-piece. Nolan had
seen them come and go; he had watched them rise and fall; he
had carried notes to them, and books and flowers; and had
helped to dispose them from the silver frame and move them on
by degrees down the line, until they went ingloriously into
the big brass bowl on the side table. Nolan approved highly
of this last choice. He did not know which one of the three
in the group it might be; but they were all pretty, and their
social standing was certainly distinguished.
Guido, the Italian model who ruled over the studio, and Nolan
were busily packing when Carlton entered. He always said that
Guido represented him in his professional and Nolan in his
social capacity. Guido cleaned the brushes and purchased the
artists' materials; Nolan cleaned his riding-boots and bought
his theatre and railroad tickets.
"Guido," said Carlton, "there are two sketches I made in
Germany last year, one of the Prime Minister, and one of
Ludwig the actor; get them out for me, will you, and pack them
for shipping. Nolan," he went on, "here is a telegram to send."
Nolan would not have read a letter, but he looked upon
telegrams as public documents, the reading of them as part of
his perquisites. This one was addressed to Oscar Von Holtz,
First Secretary, German Embassy, Washington, D.C., and the
message read:
"Please telegraph me full title and address Princess Aline of
Hohenwald. Where would a letter reach her?
"MORTON CARLTON."
The next morning Nolan carried to the express office a box
containing two oil-paintings on small canvases. They were
addressed to the man in London who attended to the shipping
and forwarding of Carlton's pictures in that town.
There was a tremendous crowd on the New York. She sailed at
the obliging hour of eleven in the morning, and many people,
in consequence, whose affection would not have stood in the
way of their breakfast, made it a point to appear and to say
goodbye. Carlton, for his part, did not notice them; he knew
by experience that the attractive-looking people always leave
a steamer when the whistle blows, and that the next most
attractive-looking, who remain on board, are ill all the way
over. A man that he knew seized him by the arm as he was
entering his cabin, and asked if he were crossing or just
seeing people off.
"Well, then, I want to introduce you to Miss Morris and her
aunt, Mrs. Downs; they are going over, and I should be glad if
you would be nice to them. But you know her, I guess?" he
asked, over his shoulder, as Carlton pushed his way after him
down the deck.
"I know who she is," he said.
Miss Edith Morris was surrounded by a treble circle of
admiring friends, and seemed to be holding her own. They all
stopped when Carlton came up, and looked at him rather
closely, and those whom he knew seemed to mark the fact by a
particularly hearty greeting. The man who had brought him up
acted as though he had successfully accomplished a somewhat
difficult and creditable feat. Carlton bowed himself away,
leaving Miss Morris to her friends, and saying that she would
probably have to see him later, whether she wished it or not.
He then went to meet the aunt, who received him kindly, for
there were very few people on the passenger list, and she was
glad they were to have his company. Before he left she
introduced him to a young man named Abbey, who was hovering
around her most anxiously, and whose interest, she seemed to
think it necessary to explain, was due to the fact that he was
engaged to Miss Morris. Mr. Abbey left the steamer when the
whistle blew, and Carlton looked after him gratefully. He
always enjoyed meeting attractive girls who were engaged, as
it left him no choice in the matter, and excused him from
finding out whether or not that particular young woman was the one.
Mrs. Downs and her niece proved to be experienced sailors, and
faced the heavy sea that met the New York outside of Sandy
Hook with unconcern. Carlton joined them, and they stood
together leaning with their backs to the rail, and trying to
fit the people who flitted past them to the names on the
passenger list.
"The young lady in the sailor suit," said Miss Morris, gazing
at the top of the smoke-stack, "is Miss Kitty Flood, of Grand
Rapids. This is her first voyage, and she thinks a steamer is
something like a yacht, and dresses for the part accordingly.
She does not know that it is merely a moving hotel."
"I am afraid," said Carlton, "to judge from her agitation,
that hers is going to be what the professionals call
a`dressing-room' part. Why is it," he asked, "that the girls
on a steamer who wear gold anchors and the men in
yachting-caps are always the first to disappear? That man
with the sombrero," he went on, "is James M. Pollock, United
States Consul to Mauritius; he is going out to his post. I
know he is the consul, because he comes from Fort Worth,
Texas, and is therefore admirably fitted to speak either
French or the native language of the island."
"Oh, we don't send consuls to Mauritius," laughed Miss Morris.
"Mauritius is one of those places from which you buy stamps,
but no one really lives or goes there."
"Where are you going, may I ask?" inquired Carlton.
Miss Morris said that they were making their way to
Constantinople and Athens, and then to Rome; that as they had
not had the time to take the southern route, they purposed to
journey across the Continent direct from Paris to the Turkish
capital by the Orient Express.
"We shall be a few days in London, and in Paris only long
enough for some clothes," she replied.
"The trousseau," thought Carlton. "Weeks is what she should
have said."
The three sat together at the captain's table, and as the sea
continued rough, saw little of either the captain or his other
guests, and were thrown much upon the society of each other.
They had innumerable friends and interests in common; and Mrs.
Downs, who had been everywhere, and for long seasons at a
time, proved as alive as her niece, and Carlton conceived a
great liking for her. She seemed to be just and kindly
minded, and, owing to her age, to combine the wider judgment
of a man with the sympathetic interest of a woman. Sometimes
they sat together in a row and read, and gossiped over what
they read, or struggled up the deck as it rose and fell and
buffeted with the wind; and later they gathered in a corner of
the saloon and ate late suppers of Carlton's devising, or
drank tea in the captain's cabin, which he had thrown open to
them. They had started knowing much about one another, and
this and the necessary proximity of the ship hastened their
acquaintance.
The sea grew calmer the third day out, and the sun came forth
and showed the decks as clean as bread-boards. Miss Morris
and Carlton seated themselves on the huge iron riding-bits in
the bow, and with their elbows on the rail looked down at the
whirlin-blue water, and rejoiced silently in the steady rush
of the great vessel, and in the uncertain warmth of the March
sun. Carlton was sitting to leeward of Miss Morris, with a
pipe between his teeth. He was warm, and at peace with the
world. He had found his new acquaintance more than
entertaining. She was even friendly, and treated him as
though he were much her junior, as is the habit of young women
lately married or who are about to be married. Carlton did
not resent it; on the contrary, it made him more at his ease
with her, and as she herself chose to treat him as a youth, he
permitted himself to be as foolish as he pleased.
"I don't know why it is," he complained, peering over the
rail, "but whenever I look over the side to watch the waves a
man in a greasy cap always sticks his head out of a hole below
me and scatters a barrelful of ashes or potato peelings all
over the ocean. It spoils the effect for one. Next time he
does it I am going to knock out the ashes of my pipe on the
back of his neck." Miss Morris did not consider this worthy
of comment, and there was a long lazy pause.
"You haven't told us where you go after London," she said; and
then, without waiting for him to reply, she asked, "Is it your
professional or your social side that you are treating to a
trip this time?"
"Who told you that?" asked Carlton, smiling.
"Oh, I don't know. Some man. He said you were a Jekyll and
Hyde. Which is Jekyll? You see, I only know your
professional side."
"You must try to find out for yourself by deduction," he said,
"as you picked out the other passengers. I am going to
Grasse," he continued. "It's the capital of Hohenwald. Do
you know it?"
"Yes," she said; "we were there once for a few days. We went
to see the pictures. I suppose you know that the old Duke,
the father of the present one, ruined himself almost by buying
pictures for the Grasse gallery. We were there at a bad time,
though, when the palace was closed to visitors, and the
gallery too. I suppose that is what is taking you there?"
"No," Carlton said, shaking his head. "No, it is not the
pictures. I am going to Grasse," he said, gravely, "to see
the young woman with whom I am in love."
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