Part 25 (2/2)

”I shall!”

”If you do, I'll smack you!” cried Erebus; and she ground her teeth.

For all her Hohenzollern blood, the princess was a timid child; but by a gracious provision of nature even the timidest female will fight in the matter of a male. She met Erebus' blazing eyes squarely and said confidently:

”He won't let you. And if you do he'll smack you--much harder!”

Had the princess been standing up, Erebus would have smacked her then and there. But she was sitting safely down; and the Queensberry rules only permit you to strike any one standing up. Erebus forgot them, stooped to strike, remembered them, straightened herself, and with a really pantherous growl dashed away in search of the Terror.

She found him examining and strengthening the barrier of thorns; and she cried:

”I know all about your kissing the princess! I never heard of such silly babyishness!”

It was very seldom, indeed, that the Terror showed himself sensible to the emotions of his sister; but on this occasion he blushed faintly as he said:

”Well, what harm is there in it?”

”It's babyis.h.!.+ It's what mollycoddles do! It's girlis.h.!.+ It's--”

The Terror of a sudden turned brazen; he said loudly and firmly:

”You mind your own business! It isn't babyish at all! She's asked me to marry her; and when we're grown up I'm going to--so there!”

CHAPTER XI

AND THE UNREST CURE

Erebus knew her brother well; she perceived that she was confronted by what she called his obstinacy; and though his brazen-faced admission had raised her to the very height of amazement and horror, she uttered no protest. She knew that protest would be vain, that against his obstinacy she was helpless. She wrung her hands and turned aside into the wood, overwhelmed by his defection from one of their loftiest ideals.

Then followed a period of strain. She a.s.sumed an att.i.tude of very haughty contempt toward the errant pair, devoted herself to Wiggins, and let them coldly alone. From this att.i.tude Wiggins was the chief sufferer: the Terror had the princess and the princess had the Terror; Erebus enjoyed her display of haughty contempt, but Wiggins missed the strenuous life, the rus.h.i.+ng games, in which you yelled so heartily. As often as he could he stole away from the haughty Erebus and joined the errant pair. It is to be feared that the princess found the kisses sweeter for the ban Erebus had laid on them.

No one in the Deepings suspected that the missing princess was on Deeping Knoll. There had been sporadic outbursts of suspicion that the Twins had had a hand in her disappearance. But no one had any reason to suppose that they and the princess had even been acquainted. Doctor Arbuthnot, indeed, questioned both Wiggins and the Terror; but they were mindful of the fact that Lady Rowington (they were always very careful to address her as Lady Rowington) and not the princess, was at the knoll, and were thus able to a.s.sure him with sufficient truthfulness that they could not tell him where the princess was. The bursts of suspicion therefore were brief.

But there was one man in England in whom suspicion had not died down.

Suspicion is, indeed, hardly the word for the feeling of Sir Maurice Falconer in the matter. When he first read in his _Morning Post_ of the disappearance of the Princess Elizabeth of Ca.s.sel-Na.s.sau from Muttle Deeping Grange he said confidently to himself: ”The Twins again!” and to that conviction his mind clung.

It was greatly strengthened by a study of the reproduction of the Socialist manifesto on the front page of an enterprising halfpenny paper. He told himself that Socialists are an educated, even over-educated folk, and if one of them did set himself to draw a skull and cross-bones, the drawing would be, if not exquisite, at any rate accurate and unsmudged; that it was highly improbable that a Socialist would spell desperate with two ”a's” in an important doc.u.ment without being corrected by a confederate. On the other hand the drawing of the skull and cross-bones seemed to him to display a skill to which the immature genius of the Terror might easily have attained, while he could readily conceive that he would spell desperate with two ”a's” in any doc.u.ment.

But Sir Maurice was not a man to interfere lightly in the pleasures of his relations; and he would not have interfered at all had it not been for the international situation produced by the disappearance of the princess. As it was he was so busy with lunches, race meetings, dinners, theater parties, dances and suppers that he was compelled to postpone intervention till the sixth day, when every Socialist organ and organization from San Francisco eastward to j.a.pan was loudly disavowing any connection with the crime, the newspapers of England and Germany were snarling and howling and roaring and bellowing at one another, and the Foreign Office and the German Chancellery were wiring frequent, carefully coded appeals to each other to invent some plausible excuse for not mobilizing their armies and fleets. Even then Sir Maurice, who knew too well the value of German press opinion, would not have interfered, had not the extremely active wife of a cabinet minister consulted him about the easiest way for her to sell twenty thousand pounds' worth of consols. He disliked the lady so strongly that after telling her how she could best compa.s.s her design, he felt that the time had come to ease the international situation.

With this end in view he went down to Little Deeping. His conviction that the Twins were responsible for the disappearance of the princess became cert.i.tude when he learned from Mrs. Dangerfield that they were encamped on Deeping Knoll, and had been there since the day before that disappearance. But he kept that cert.i.tude to himself, since it was his habit to do things in the pleasantest way possible.

He forthwith set out across the fields and walked through the home wood and park to Muttle Deeping Grange. He gave his card to the butler and told him to take it straight to Miss Lambart, with whom he was on terms of friends.h.i.+p rather than of acquaintance; and in less than three minutes she came to him in the drawing-room.

She was looking anxious and worried; and as they shook hands he said: ”Is this business worrying you?”

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