Part 26 (2/2)

”Oh, but he is slow!” Pollyooly protested. ”It would take weeks and weeks to really do anything with him--weeks and weeks.”

”But what can you expect?” said the Honourable John Ruffin amiably.

”The red Deepings were notable people, ruling a county, and hacking and hewing the best people in four counties round, when the ancestors of the prince were swineherds in a Prussian forest. And those ancestors stayed in that forest for five hundred years after that. Prince Adalbert doesn't throw back more than a hundred and fifty years. If a red Deeping produced an Adalbert, he would throw back six hundred and fifty years; and it isn't done.”

”Yes,” said Pollyooly politely, though she did not follow at all his abstruse dissertation.

”So you see you needn't feel overpaid at all,” he said.

”No,” said Pollyooly in the tone of one perfectly satisfied.

”Besides, if you do, you can always put in a little more training.”

”Oh, yes: that was what I was meaning to do,” she said.

Now that Pollyooly had been approved, or rather enthusiastically welcomed, as the ideal companion of Prince Adalbert, the baron was all affability and winning smiles. He had indeed reason to be, for she made life much easier for him. Without a care he abandoned Prince Adalbert to her whenever she would have him, and sat reading or sleeping in his deck-chair on the sunny sands with a mind wholly at peace. With that approved guardian the prince must be safe.

Thus it came about that he became Pollyooly's perpetual companion, or, to be exact, her perpetual hanger-on. He could not be said to afford companions.h.i.+p to her, for, like the Lump, he preferred the grunt to articulate speech. He played in all the games in which she played--at least, if they were not too difficult for his understanding. If they were, he watched her play them with the dogged attention of an enthusiast.

As she came to know him better and better, it is to be feared that Pollyooly remembered his exalted station less and less. She quite forgot the prince in the boy. She sometimes deplored the fact to Mrs.

Gibson that though Adalbert could now be trusted not to get into mischief by any act of will, he was so stupid that he needed a perpetual eye on him.

The Honourable John Ruffin sometimes enquired about his progress in morals, manners, and intelligence; Pollyooly's report on it was always dispirited. But he was surprised, on returning home from Littlestone to tea one evening, to find Pollyooly entertaining royalty in the parlour of the fl.u.s.tered Mrs. Wilson.

The prince had come back from a walk through the marsh with her, tired; and she had thought it better that he should have tea before walking the length of the village to his own lodging.

The Honourable John Ruffin did not let his surprise be seen; he greeted his royal guest civilly and sat down. Pollyooly questioned him closely and with genuine interest about his successes and reverses on the links. Then the Honourable John Ruffin observed that his royal guest was flushed; then he discovered that Pollyooly was entertaining him in a fas.h.i.+on at once negligent and drastic: she made no effort to include him in their talk, but she was watching him with the eye of a lynx and giving him a lesson in table manners with the coldest serenity.

”What is the matter with our royal guest exactly?” said the Honourable John Ruffin presently.

”He is so hard to teach,” said Pollyooly plaintively. ”You'd be surprised. I keep telling him not to eat like a pig; and for about four mouthfuls he doesn't. Then he forgets all about it; and I have to begin all over again.”

The guilty flush deepened in the cheeks of the prince.

”You must give it time to sink in. He's not used to learning things; he has been so neglected,” said the Honourable John Ruffin with a hospitable desire to make things easier for her royal guest.

Pollyooly shook her head doubtfully, and frowned sadly upon the prince.

”It would take weeks and weeks; and I don't really ever see him at meals,” she said.

”Never mind: do what you can when you get the chance,” said the Honourable John Ruffin in a heartening tone.

”That's what I must do,” said Pollyooly; but there was no great hopefulness in her voice.

Sadly she handed a plate of cake to Prince Adalbert. There was a sudden gleam in his small, but Hohenzollern, eye, and in one swift gesture he took, or rather, to be exact, grabbed a slice, and thrust a corner of it into his mouth.

As Pollyooly had said, for the first four bites all was well; but the next three were accompanied by a slushy noise such as arises in a pigstye at mealtime.

”There! There it is again!” she cried in tones of the bitterest protest. ”Isn't it dreadful?”

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