That talk with Max formed the preliminary to a month of the most strenuous verbal and intellectual conflict that the King had ever known. Outside all was calm: the Constitutional Crisis was in suspension; by agreement on both sides hostilities had been deferred till trade should have reaped its full profit out of the Silver Jubilee celebrations. The papers spoke admiringly of this truce to party warfare as "instinctive loyalty" on the part of the people, "expressive of their desire to do honor to a beloved sovereign in a spirit undisturbed by the contending voices of faction."

There was no "instinctive loyalty," however, within the Cabinet! While streets were decorating and illuminations preparing, ministers were giving his Majesty a thoroughly bad time.

In a way, of course, he brought it upon himself, for at the very next Council meeting after his conversation with Max he did a thing which, so far as his own reign was concerned, was absolutely without precedent: he opened his mouth and spoke;—objected, contended, argued. And at the sound of his voice uttering something more than mere formalities, ministers sat up amazed, most of them very angry and scandalized at so unexpected a reversion to the constitutional usages of a previous generation.

Not a word of all this leaked out. The whole thing was an admirable example of that keeping-up of appearances on which bureaucratic government so largely depends. And it was, if you come to think of it, a very deftly arranged affair. There was the whole country bobbing with loyalty, enthusiasm, and commercial opportunism; the Cabinet unencumbered for a while by any parliamentary situation that could cause anxiety, and correspondingly free to direct its energies elsewhere; and there within the Council, and without a soul to advise him, was the King, scuffling confusedly against the predatory devices of his ministers. The poor man's knowledge of the Constitution was but scanty, and his powers of argument were feeble, for from the day of his accession the word "precedent" had governed him. Yet he had an idea, a feeling, that he was now being forced into a wrong position; the constitutional breath was being beaten out of his body, and he would pass from his levees, from his receptions of foreign embassies and addresses of loyalty and congratulation, to a conflict in Council which reminded him of nothing so much as a "scrum" upon the football field. Through one goal or another he was to be kicked—the exercise of the Crown's prerogative to nominate Free Church Bishops, or the refusal to exercise it. And whichever expedient he was driven to in the end, he knew that on one side grandiloquent words would be written about his fine instinct for the constitutional limitations or powers of monarchy, and on the other, pained, but deeply respectful words of regret that he had been so ill-advised by his ministers—or by others. Whichever side loses, it is the football which wins the game. That, however, is merely the spectator's point of view. The football only knows that it has been kicked. Yet the King was well aware that in Parliament at any rate appearances would be kept up; and that whatever corner of the field he got kicked to, the blame for it would be laid, ostensibly, on others; though, as a result, the monarchy to which it was his bounden duty to "add luster" would be either strengthened or weakened: and what course to take he really did not know.

His mind, in consequence, was greatly troubled. Being of conservative instincts he believed that, in the main, the Bishops were right and the Prime Minister wrong. The Prime Minister had been harassing the country with general elections; and the country had had about as many as it could stand: yet without a fresh election no other ministry was possible. And now, at a moment when the country was bent on profiting by the revival in trade which the approaching celebrations had stimulated, nothing would be so unpopular as a fresh ministerial crisis; and he could have no doubt that, whatever the papers might pretend to say, the odium of that crisis, if due to his own action, would fall eventually upon himself.

And the Prime Minister knew it! Yes, just at that juncture, resignation, or the threat of it, had become an absolutely compelling card; and he was playing it for all it was worth. Free Church Bishops were to be promised for the ensuing year, or the Ministry would be bound to feel, here and now, that his Majesty's confidence in it had been withdrawn.

Resignation, aimed not against any opposing majority in Parliament, but against the demur and opposition of the Crown itself—that fact in all its political significance, with all its possible developments of danger for the State and of humiliation for the monarchy, was daily pressing its relentless weight against the King's scruples. The more unanswerable it seemed the more angry he became, the more keenly did he feel that he was being unfairly used. And then, one day, as he sat thinking at his desk, all at once a new thought occurred to him, throwing a queer radiance into his face, of joy mixed with cunning. And then, gradually, it faded out and left a blank; the old expression of anxiety and distrustfulness returned. He shook his head at himself, scared that such a thought should ever have come into it. "No, no, it wouldn't do!" he muttered. "Impossible."

All the same he got up from his desk, and in deep cogitation began walking about the room. The carpet with its rich variegated pattern, like Max's conversation, helped him to think; until certain deliveries of a royal courier from abroad came to divert his attention to more particular and family affairs.

Nevertheless his mind had again reverted to its vetoed notion when, an hour later, on his way to the Queen's apartments he met the Princess Charlotte tripping gaily along the corridor. She stopped to give him her "return home" embrace. "How well you are looking, papa!" cried she, admiring his flushed countenance. But the King, though he smiled, remained preoccupied with the embryos of statecraft.

"My dear," he said abruptly, "do you think that I am popular?"

"Why, yes, papa, of course!" she said, opening sweet eyes at him. "Doesn't everybody cheer you when you go anywhere?"

"I think," said her father dubiously, lending his ears in fancy to the sound, "I think that crowds get into the habit of cheering,—not because they care for me, but just because there are a lot of them, and they like to hear the sound of their own voices."

"But sometimes you have quite small crowds," said his daughter, "and still they cheer."

"Yes, yes," he allowed, "so they do. Yes, even the nursemaids, I notice, wave their handkerchiefs when I ride by them in the park. And I daresay some of them do it because they are sorry for me."

"Sorry for you, papa?"

"My dear, wouldn't you be sorry to have to be King now-a-days? It's no fun, I can assure you."

"I wouldn't like to be King always," said Charlotte, with honesty; "but you know, papa, with all the Silver Jubilee celebrations coming on you are quite immensely popular."

"Ah!" said the King. "Thank you, my dear, that is what I wanted to know."

He went on to the Queen's apartments, and Princess Charlotte stood looking after him. "Poor dear!" she said to herself. She was sorry for him too—very sorry just now; for she had a secret growing within her somewhere between heart and head which, if he knew of it—and some day he would have to know of it—would cause him a great deal of worry.

This young woman with her growing secret was at that time twenty-three.

II

The Princess Charlotte had a way of drawing in a breath as if to speak, and then bottling it. This little performance was at times very telling in its effect—it spoke volumes: it told of a long training in self-repression which still did not come quite naturally: it told of inward combustion, of a tightly cornered but still independent mind. Ladies-in-waiting had seen the Princess run out of her mother's presence to tabber her feet on the inlaid floor of the corridor, thence to return smooth, sweet-tempered, and amiable; for between Charlotte and the Queen there were temperamental differences which had to declare themselves or find safety through emergency exits.

The Princess had no such difficulties with her father, for imperturbability was not one of his characteristics, and imperturbability was the one quality in a parent which the Princess simply could not stand; it made her feel powerless; and to feel powerless toward one's intellectual inferiors is, to certain temperaments, maddening. Charlotte had long since been brought to recognize that her mother, in her own dear way, was quite hopeless: but she was able with astonishing ease to get upon her father's nerves and to trouble his conscience; for while the Queen remained impervious to all influences outside the conventions of her training and her habits, the King was as open to new scruples of conscience as a sieve is to the wind—fresh ideas rattled in his head like green peas in a cullender—when he shook his head it seemed to shake them about, and all the larger ones came uppermost; and the Princess Charlotte had in recent years acquired a habit of entangling her father, with the most engaging simplicity, in moral problems for which constitutional monarchy could find no answer.

She was evidently interested in politics, and when of late the King, wishing to check so dangerous a tendency, had sought to know the reason why, she had answered with perfect frankness: "Max says" (for to her, also, Max, the man born to inaction, had been talking), "Max says he is not sure if he means to come to the throne. If he doesn't, it is just as well I should know something of the business."

The young lady had a most disrespectful way of talking about the monarchy as "the business," and did not say it as if in joke.

"Are you going to business to-day, papa?" was actually the phrase uttered in all seriousness, which had met him one of the days when he went down to open Parliament. But though she spoke thus gracelessly of an important State function she attended it herself with grace, and behaved well.

The Princess Charlotte had learned many things alien to her nature; but she had never learned that correctitude of deportment which is supposed to accompany all those born in the regal purple from the cradle to the grave. She substituted for it, however, something much more individual and charming. Tall and abundantly alive, she moved in soft rushes rather quicker than a walk; and her manner of swimming down a room, with swift invisible run of feet, and just three long undulating bows on the top of all—those three doing duty for so many—was a sight on the decorum of which Court opinion was sharply divided. Yet every one admitted that though she might lack convention or anything in the least resembling "the grand manner"—she had a style of her own; many also—even those who disapproved—admitted her charm. As she talked to her chosen intimates, her two hands would go out in quick bird-like gestures of momentary contact, while her brightly moving face gave a constant invitation to the free entry of her thoughts. Barriers she had none. A dangerous young person for getting her own way; for in the process she often got not only her own but other people's as well.

At the moment when she makes her introductory bow from the pages of this history her main and consuming desire was to secure the ordering of her own dresses; and to obtain that preliminary measure of independence for the expression of her own character she was prepared, in the face of maternal opposition, to go to considerable lengths.

The King when he met her in the corridor was, as we have said, preoccupied with affairs of State. But his preoccupation was partly put on with intent for the concealment of other thoughts. The sight of his daughter at that moment, embarrassed him—gave him, indeed, almost a sense of guilt, for he held in his hand a letter from the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser accepting the circuitously worded proposal, with all its delicate adumbrations of yet other proposals to follow, that he should visit the Jingalese Court early in the ensuing year—immediately, that is to say, upon his return from South America; and though in his reply the veiled object of that visit was not mentioned there was a touch here and there of compliment, of warmth, of a wish that the date were not so far off, which indicated "a coming on disposition."

And so, under the bright eyes of his daughter, the King was conscious of a sense of guilt, in that he was concealing from her something in which her future was very greatly concerned. It seemed hardly fair thus to be pushing matters on without letting her know: and yet—what else could he do? So, covering his affectionate embarrassment in inquiries about himself, he shuffled past; and when he had gone a little further, turned to take another look at her, and found, startled, that she too was looking at him. There, at opposite ends of the long corridor, father and daughter stood interrogatively at gaze, each feeling a little guilty, each wondering what, at the dÉnouement, the other would say. Then the charming Charlotte blew him a kiss from her hand, and his Majesty did likewise; and, off to the fulfilment of her destiny went the Princess; and off to his fulfilment of her destiny went he; each quite sure in their two different ways that they knew what was best for her.

III

The King found the Queen at her knitting, very placid and contented and well pleased with herself, for she had just been giving Charlotte a mild talking to. Charlotte had come home with adjectives in her mouth of which the Queen did not approve, and with enthusiasms that went riotously beyond bounds. She had talked of some Professor's translation of a Greek play as "glorious"; and of the play itself—a play all about expatriated women who, their proper husbands having been killed in a siege, were forced to accept at the hands of their enemies husbands of a less proper kind—she had talked of that play as "the most immense, immortal, and modern thing in all drama."

"I told her," said the Queen, "that she was talking about what she didn't understand; but she answered that she had seen it three times. I said, that to go and see the same play three times—especially a play with murders in it—showed a morbid taste. She didn't seem to mind: 'Then I am morbid,' was her reply. And when I said, 'That comes of making friends with these intellectual women,' she only laughed at me. I shan't let her go again, it is doing her harm; she has far too many ideas, far too many: and where she picks them all up I'm sure I don't know; she doesn't get them from me!"

And then the conversation—though Charlotte remained its subject—took another turn, for the King put into his wife's hand the letter he had received from the Prince of Schnapps-Wasser, and immediately her comments began.

"He writes a nice hand," she said, "and expresses himself very well. Speaks of writing a book on his travels; he must be clever. Well, at all events, it's very evident that he means to come, and wants to. We must ask him to send his photograph. I think, my dear, we have made a very good choice, and Charlotte may consider herself very fortunate. But what a pity he's not coming sooner. Well, Charlotte must wait, that's all!"

And so in her own mind the matter was settled, and only the usual details waited to be arranged. She handed the letter back to him.

"Of course," she said, "before he comes Charlotte must have a bigger allowance." She became meditative. "By the way, you had better leave it in my hands; don't give it to Charlotte herself. She wheedles you, I know; but she has ideas about dress which I am not going to encourage; she makes herself far too noticeable as it is. Somebody has been talking to her about 'national costume' and the folly of fashions; and she actually said just now that she wanted to have some kind of dress that she could wear three years running! I told her that fashions were made to be followed, and that it was her duty to follow them. Oh, she was quite sweet about it, and said she supposed I knew best, which of course is true. But she had a sort of 'I'll ask papa' look in her eyes that made me suspicious. She went out just before you came."

"I met her," observed the King.

"And she said nothing?"

"Not a word about her dress allowance."

"Ah, that's all right, then: she takes what I tell her sometimes." Then with a quick glance the Queen asked abruptly: "Have you seen Max?"

"I fancy I may be seeing him this evening," returned the King casually, for he wished to conceal even from his wife the importance he had begun to attach to his son's visits.

"Something is happening," said the Queen pointedly; "at least, so I am informed. That—that person I told you about—she isn't there now."

"However do you come to know that?" inquired the King, surprised; but his question was ignored.

"She has gone abroad," went on his informant. "Had you said anything to Max?"

"I did speak to him."

"Then it seems to have had its effect."

The King very much doubted whether the effect was any of his doing; but he held his peace.

"Now we must find somebody for him," continued the dear lady, covering the past in a tone of charitable allowance.

"I think that Max will find somebody for himself."

But this was not to her taste at all. "How can he," she objected, "unless we send him abroad? I'm sure there's nobody here."

But the King had come recently to know more about Max than his wife did. "Max will find somebody for himself," he repeated; "and if he thinks it worth while, he will go all round the world on a wild goose chase to look for her."

IV

Could the King only have known it, Max had already found his choice nearer home. His domestic arrangements having been temporarily disturbed by a certain lady's departure to visit her son on his estates, he had gone off on a spurt of social curiosity to inspect the slums of his father's capital, and on the third day of his investigation had spied, under a nursing sister's habit, and above a gentle breast bearing an ivory cross, the face of his dreams. Having taken scientific steps to discover whether that particular garb entailed celibate vows, and learning that it did not, he had industriously run its wearer to sainted earth—had, that is to say, pursued her to a top-floor tenement and there found her upon her knees with sanitary zeal scrubbing dirt from the boards of poverty; and poverty upon its bed whimpering with rage and feebly cursing her for thus coming to disturb its peace. Thus they had met, and very promptly and practically had the wearer of the habit made him pay the price for his intrusion by setting him there and then to work of a kind he had never tackled before.

Who she was, and all the sacred dance that she led him on holy feet, before she gave him that reward which was his due, will be told in the later pages of this history. For the present Max had hardly any idea how pure and deep a Jordan he was about to be dipped in, or how thorough a scrubbing he himself was to receive. His voice was still like the rollings of Abana and Pharpar, when he came on this next evening to discourse up-to-date wisdom in his father's ears; not a hair of his well-groomed head showed the ruffling of perturbed thoughts within, nor were his self-confidence and easy satisfaction in the moral and mental liberties wherein he ranged at large in any way diminished or disturbed.

When they had settled down to their talk, the King confidentially broached the proposed visit of the Hereditary Prince of Schnapps-Wasser and its intended significance. Max did not seem particularly impressed. "What does Charlotte say about it?" he inquired casually.

"Charlotte does not say anything. How should she? She does not yet know."

Max smiled. "It will be time, then, to talk about it when she does."

"But there is really nobody else; and Charlotte must marry somebody."

"Has she said so?" inquired Max. "My own impression is that she will have to get through at least one good healthy love affair of her own before she settles down to anything you or the Courts of Europe can provide. After that—if you let her plunge deep enough—you won't have any trouble; she will marry anything you offer. Of course, if you really believed in monarchy as a principle, and not as a mere expedient—a divine institution, and not as the last ditch in which the old class-barriers have to be maintained—you would let her marry any one she chose. It would do the monarchy no harm, and might do it good."

The King shook his head. "It's no use talking like that," said he. "We are not free, any of us. The more other ranks of society have become mixed, commercially mixed—for you know it is money that has done it—the more we must maintain ours. Royalty must not barter itself away."

"But you do barter it," said Max, "for rank if not for gold. And the one is really as base as the other. The great game for royalty to play now-a-days is courageous domesticity."

"There are limits," replied his father. "We must maintain our position."

"That is just where you make the mistake," retorted Max. "You and my dear mother are always ready to play the domestic game where it is not important. You allow photographs of your private life to be on sale in shop-windows; charming private details slip out in newspaper paragraphs; one of you behaves with natural and decent civility to some ordinary poor person, and news of it is immediately flashed to all the press. Two years ago, for instance, when you were triumphantly touring the United States you arrived by some accident at a place called New York; and there, early one morning, having evaded the reporters, you stood looking up at the sky-scrapers when you trod on an errand-boy's toe, or knocked his basket out of his hand; and having done so you touched your hat and apologized—you a King to an errand-boy! And immediately all America, which yawps of equality and of one man being the equal of any other, fell rapturously in love with you! You, I daresay, have forgotten the incident?"

"Quite," said the King.

"But America remembers it. When you left, with all the locusts of the press clinging to the wheels of your chariot, they dubbed you 'conqueror of hearts'; and it was mainly because you had knocked over an errand-boy and apologized to him. Now you do these things naturally; but they are all really part of the business: your secretaries report them to the press."

"What?" exclaimed the King, startled.

"Why, of course! The errand-boy didn't know you from Adam, and no one but your private secretary was with you at the time; at least, so I gathered: it was before breakfast and you had given the detectives the slip. Well, then, merely by letting your human nature and your sense of decency have free play you help to run the monarchic system—you almost make a success of it. But you stop just where you ought to go on. You are natural—you are yourself—where there is no opposition to your being so. If you would go on being natural where there is opposition—where all sorts of high social and political reasons step in and forbid—you would find yourself far more powerful than the Constitution intended you to be, for you would have the people with you. There is a mountain of sentiment ready to rush to your side if you only had the faith to call it to you. Have you not noticed, whenever a royal engagement is announced, how every paper in the land declares it to be a real genuine love-match? And you know—well, you know. I myself can remember Aunt Sophie crying her eyes out for love of the Bishop of Bogaboo whom she fell in love with at a missionary meeting and wasn't allowed to marry; and six weeks later her engagement to Prince Wolf-im-Schafs-Kleider was announced as a sudden and romantic love-match! Why, he had only been sent for to be looked at when the Bogaboo affair became dangerous; and so Aunt Sophie was coerced into that melancholy mold of a jelly which she has retained ever since.

"Now that is where my grandfather showed himself out of touch with the spirit of the age. Had he allowed Aunt Sophie to marry the Bishop and go out during the cool months of the year to teach Bogaboo ladies the use of the crinoline—it was just when crinolines were going out of fashion here, and they could have got them cheap—he would have done a most popular stroke for the monarchy."

"But you forget, my dear boy," said the King, "the Bogaboos were at that time a really dangerous tribe—they still practised cannibalism."

"Yes, they still had their natural instincts unimpaired; the Christian substitute of gin had not yet taken hold on them, and their national institution still provided the one form of useful martyrdom that was left to us. Had Aunt Sophie, or her husband, been eaten by savages there would have been a boom in missions, and both the Church and the monarchy would have benefited enormously. Royalty must take its risks. Kings no longer ride into battle at the head of their armies: even the cadets of royalty, when they get leave to go, are kept as much out of danger as possible. But if royalty cannot lead in something more serious than the trooping of colors and the laying of foundation-stones, then royalty is no longer in the running.

"Now what you ought to do is—find out at what point it would break with all tradition for you to be really natural and think and act as an ordinary gentleman of sense and honor, and then—go and do it! The Government would roll its eyes in horror; the whole Court would be in commotion; but with the people generally you would win hands down!"

"Max, you are tempting me!" said the King.

"Sir," said his son, "I cannot express to you how great is my wish to be proud of your shoes if hereafter I have to step into them. Could you not just once, for my sake, do something that no Government would expect—just to disturb that general smugness of things which is to-day using the monarchy as its decoy?"

The King gazed upon the handsome youth with eyes of hunger and affection. "What is it that you want me to do?" he inquired.

Max held out his cigar at arm's length, looked at it reflectively, and flicked off the ash.

"Don't do that on the carpet!" said his father.

Max smiled. "That is so like you, father," he said; "yes, that is you all over. You don't like to give trouble even to the housemaid. Now when you see things going wrong you ought to give trouble—serious trouble, I mean. You ought, in vulgar phrase, to 'do a bust.'

"When I was a small boy," he went on, "I used to read fairy stories and look at pictures. And there was one that I have always remembered of a swan with a crown round its neck floating along a stream with its beak wide open, singing its last song. To me that picture has ever since represented the institution of monarchy going to its death. The crown, too large and heavy to remain in place, has slipped down from its head and settled like a collar or yoke about its neck. Its head, in consequence, is free, and it begins to sing its 'Nunc dimittis.' The question to me is—what 'Nunc dimittis' are we going to sing? I do not know whether you ever read English poetry; but some lines of Tennyson run in my head; let me, if I can remember, repeat them now—

"That, my dear father, is the song I wish to hear you singing—that I want to take up, I in my turn after you. I want your voice now to be awful and jubilant, and your carol to be 'free and bold' like the carol of that dying bird; and the sound of it to be like the rejoicing of a mighty people on a day of festival."

The King shook his head. "My dear boy," he said, "I don't understand poetry; I never did."

"Well," said the son, "let me interpret it then into prose. Monarchy as an institution is dying, and it can either die in foolish decrepitude, or it can die mightily, merging itself in democracy for a final blow against bureaucratic government. All that is written in my book. That is why I am now able to express myself so well: these periods are largely a matter of quotation. The right rÔle for monarchy to-day is, believe me, to be above all things democratic—not by truckling to the ideas of the people in power—the 'ruling classes' as they still call themselves—but by daring to be human and natural, and to refuse absolutely to be dehumanized on the score of its high dignity and calling.

"If, for instance, I came to you to-day and said I wanted to marry one of my own nation—say even a commoner—in preference to the daughter of some foreign princeling, let me do it! It breaks with a foolish tradition—largely our own importation when, as foreigners, we were seeking to keep up our prestige—it may annoy or even embarrass the Government. Well! have they not annoyed and embarrassed you?"

The King nodded sympathetically, but in words hastened to correct himself. "One has often to make sacrifices in defense of an institution," he said. "That is a duty we both owe."

"Why," inquired the Prince, "should I make sacrifices to an institution I do not really approve? Why should I pretend to love some foreign princess if I have given my heart to one—I cannot say of my own race—for I remember that we are an importation—but of the country of my adoption? Do you really suppose that because it annoys the Prime Minister and disturbs his political calculations, an alliance within those artificially prohibited degrees imposed on royalty will lessen the influence of the Crown by a straw's weight, or quicken its demise by an hour? This country, like all civilized countries, is moving towards some form of republican government. If we are sufficiently human, if we show ourselves determined to call our souls our own—it is not merely possible, it is probable, that when the change comes we shall be called on by popular acclaim to provide the country with its first President. If we did we could secure for that presidency a greater power and prestige than any bureaucratic government would willingly concede. It may be that the real counter-stroke to the present increase of Cabinet control can most effectively be administered by a monarch who is not too careful to preserve the outward forms of monarchy. When that is done, by you, or by me, or by one who comes after us, I am confident that there will be the sound of a people's rejoicing."

"You have strange ideas," said the King, "for one who calls himself a monarchist."

"I am a republican," said the young man.

The King stared at him as though at some strange animal. "You don't say so!" he murmured half aghast. "Supposing the Prime Minister were to find out."

"He will soon," said the Prince. "I shall be sending him a copy of my book on the day of publication."

The King shook his head warningly. Then he smiled, a shy nervous smile. "It would be very awkward," he said slowly, "very awkward indeed, if you happened to come to the throne just now. I really don't know what Brasshay would do. But it's too late for me to begin that sort of thing—far too late now."