Part 42 (1/2)
”Certainly not, sir; had she been recognized the thing could never have happened. She must to some extent have altered her dress and her appearance: as to that I have no particulars. The name she actually went in under was Ann Juggins.”
”Preposterous!” exclaimed the King. ”And supposing that were to come out!”
”That is the trouble, sir. Without the full and immediate exercise of your authority, I fear it may. As a matter of fact, that is why she still remains where we found her.”
”Oh! Stuff and nonsense!” cried the King. ”You don't come for my authority in cases of this kind. Let her out, let her out! and say nothing more about it!”
”The Prefect, sir, has already been to see her, and she refuses to be let out; that is to say, declares that if she is not allowed to serve her full sentence she will make the whole of the affair public.”
”Public?”
”Name and all. There was her ultimatum; she made a special point of it.
Her Highness seems somehow to be aware that the name is an impossible one, a weapon against which no Government department could stand. The word 'Juggins,'--only think, sir, what it means! Here we have a ridiculous, a most lamentable blunder committed by the police, sufficient of itself to cause us the gravest embarra.s.sment; and then to have on the top of it all this name with its ridiculous a.s.sociation rising up to confound us. We should go down as 'the Juggins Cabinet'; the word would be cried after us by every errand-boy in the street--the Government would become impossible.”
The King did his best to conceal his delight at the predicament in which Charlotte's escapade had, by the confession of its Chief, placed the Cabinet. This tyrannical Government, in spite of its large majority, its strong party organization, and its bureaucratic powers, was unable to stand up against ridicule; a mere breath, and all its false pretensions to dignity would be exposed, and its dry bones, speciously clad in strong armor, would rattle down into the dust.
And if he chose to use this knowledge suddenly gained, what a power it would give him! Yes; he had only to send for Charlotte and bid her cry 'Juggins,' and that which, with so many months of anxious toil and with threat of abdication, he had failed to bring about, would immediately accomplish itself in other ways. But unfortunately the King was a man of scrupulous conscience, and was bound by his ideas of what became a monarch and a gentleman. He may have been quite mistaken in regarding as unclean the weapon with which Heaven had supplied him; but as he did so regard it, one must reluctantly admit that he was right to throw it aside.
”Well,” he said, when the Prime Minister had finished, ”she must be made not to tell, that's all!”
”I fear, sir, she is very determined.”
”Determined to do what?”
”To serve out her sentence.”
The King sat and thought for a while. He knew his Charlotte better than the police did; and, besides that, during the past week he had quite made up his mind that the Prefect of Police was in some matters a blunderer. ”I wonder how he tried to get her out,” he meditated aloud.
”Did she send me any message?”
”Nothing direct, sir, that I know of; but I take it that her ultimatum was also directed against any possible action on the part of your Majesty. She was quite determined to do her full time; said indeed that you had promised her a fortnight. What that may mean, I do not know.”
”Oh, really!” cried the King, ”the folly of the official mind is past all believing,--especially when it concentrates itself in the police force! Let somebody go to that poor child and tell her that her father and mother have had a bomb thrown at them, and are trying to recover themselves in the grief caused by her absence! And then unchain her (you keep them in chains, I suppose?), open the door of her prison, and see how she'll run! And tell the Prefect,” he added, ”that I cannot present him with my compliments.”
The King was quite right. In case Charlotte should refuse to believe the official word, she was shown a newspaper with lurid ill.u.s.trations; and within an hour's time she was back at the palace, weeping, holding her father and mother alternately in her arms, and scolding them for all the world as though they had been guilty of outrageous behavior, and not she.
And, after all, it was a very good way of getting over the preliminaries of a rather awkward meeting.
IV
But when the first transports of joy at that reunion were over, they had to settle down to naughty facts and talk with serious disapproval to Charlotte of her past doings. And as they did so, though she still wept a little, the Princess observed with secret satisfaction that she had at any rate cured her mother of one thing--of knitting, namely, while a daughter's fate was being dangled in the parental balance.
From that day on when Charlotte showed that she was really in earnest the Queen put down her knitting; and those who have lived under certain domestic conditions where tyranny is always, as though by divine right, benevolent, wise, self-confident, and self-satisfied to the verge of conceit, will recognize that this in itself was no inconsiderable triumph.
Charlotte was quite straightforward as to why she had done the thing; she had done it partly out of generous enthusiasm for a cause which she did not very well understand, but to which certain friends of hers had attached themselves with a blind and dogged obstinacy (two of those friends she had left in prison behind her); but more because she wished to supply an object lesson of what she was really like to the Prince of Schnapps-Wa.s.ser.
She insisted that he was to be told all about it. And the Queen was in despair.
”Tell him that you have been in jail like a common criminal for a.s.saulting the police? I couldn't, it would break my heart! I should die of the shame of it.”