Chapter 22: Particeps Criminis

Toward the dinner hour excitement in the house became intense as the royal circus fussed and pinned and basted and struggled with its impromptu costumes.

Bells jangled to summon Thusis and Clelia; the Princess Pudelstoff was too fat to braid her own hair; the Countess Manntrapp required basting into her boy’s breeches; the Queen, desiring to go as the infant Germania, had pasted tin-foil all over her high Austrian corset, but still it didn’t resemble armor, nor did the oval boiler-lid furnished by Josephine Vannis particularly resemble a shield.

Otherwise a blonde wig of tow in two obese braids and a shiny fireman’s helmet of 1840 which I discovered in the garret, consoled the queen. To these properties I rashly added an eel-spear; and then, remembering her quick temper, I feared for King Constantine, wondering whether, if fatally prodded, he would name me as accessory after the fact.

As for the men, they continually rang for Raoul who acted as dresser and as messenger between them and Josephine Vannis who had constructed their costumes from odd scraps and from such of their own garments as would serve.

Admiral Lauterlaus was monstrous as a sailor-boy of six; Von Bummelzug, Eddin Bey, Von Dungheim, and Secretary Gizzler were school-lads in socks, bare knees, and denim blouses. King Constantine who, it appeared, rather fancied his own legs, went as a smirking doll in a costume principally constructed out of his wife’s underclothes.

But the most gruesome sight of all was Ferdinand as a youthful ballet-girl; and he most horridly resembled an elephant on his hind legs in a stick-out tulle skirt, and his enormous feet, cross-ribboned, went shuffling and flapping to and fro as he waddled about busy with powder and rouge.

Raoul laced his stays and tugged in vain to indent his bulk. It was useless, but we got him into his corsage and left him before a mirror ponderously prancing in imitation of the pony ballet, and singing la-la-la! furtively peeping the while at his own proportions with the unfeigned pleasure of perfect approval.

Really, except for the characters of these impossible individuals, the jolly noise and confusion they made with their preparations and the lively excitement that pervaded hall, corridor and stair, resembled the same sort of delightful uproar one hears at a week-end party in a big country house under similar circumstances.

The queen’s bell had been jangling persistently for some minutes when, stepping from my room into the hallway to see whether anybody was answering it, I came face to face with Thusis.

Warm, and delicately flushed with her exertions, she was half vexed, half laughing now as she cast a prudent glance right and left along the corridor before slipping through the door into my room. I followed, locking the door.

“Michael,” she began, “the queen says there are not enough women in the party and she insists that Clelia and I find costumes and join. I was furious—and she’s making a violent row about it now, insisting, bullying, ordering Clelia about——”

“What! Ordering my servants about!” I interrupted angrily.

“Yes—your servants, Michael,” dropping me an ironical curtsey which brought me back to my senses. We both laughed. And suddenly it occurred to me how adorable Thusis would be at a baby-party.

“Why not?” I exclaimed. “Why not drop hostilities for an hour and enjoy the ridiculous? Absurdity always appeals to you, anyway, Thusis,” I added, “and the entire situation is so impossible that it ought to attract you!”

“It does,” she admitted with that engaging and reckless little laugh I had come to know so well. “Besides, you are my host, Michael, and I am under your roof. So who your ragamuffin-bobtail guests may be does not concern me. Clelia and I are not responsible, are we?”

“Not at all,” said I. “The ignominy of this royal riff-raff rests upon my shoulders. Anyway, you do not need to dance except with me,” I added reassuringly.

“Eddin Bey is rather attractive,” she mused, letting her glance rest on me sideways while the innocent pleasure of this discovery parted her lips in a honeyed smile.

“All right,” said I shortly, “dance with him!”

“Michael——”

“Go ahead and dance with him,” I repeated, stabbed by the most ignoble of emotions.

“What an absolute boy you can be,” she said. “If I do this thing at all it is because the tension of months is becoming unendurable. Reaction from the tragic usually lands one on the edges of the grotesque ... If you had been a girl, Michael, always sheltered, secure, living a colorless restricted life, and if you suddenly were cast upon your own feet with the accumulated responsibility of your race on your shoulders, —and if, in the very middle of your first years of liberty and opportunity you suddenly found this wonderful world flaming like hell all about you, and all its inhabitants at each other’s throats, and all delight in living turned to hate and fear—and if you concluded to take your fate into your own hands and run away from authority, and, in your own way, fight the good fight for God and King and Country, —and if the strain became, for an hour, too great—wouldn’t you react—perhaps to the verge of folly?”

“You bet I would, sweetness,” said I, taking her lovely hands in mine.

“I was a school-girl,” she said, “when—it devolved upon me, and upon Clelia, to determine our own futures ... The loss of parents is a—bewildering thing ... Our mania was travel and education to fit us for—for what we considered to be our rightful future positions in the world ... We have been in your country, —I don’t mean Chile. We know England and France—God bless them both. Then, owing deference anyway if not perhaps blind obedience to the—to a—gentleman in Italy——”

“The King,” I said soberly.

“Yes, the King of Italy. We were expected to return to Rome and defer to him all questions concerning our future ... And we ran away.”

“Why, Thusis?”

“Because we happen to have minds of our own, Michael.”

“And you immediately employed them by concocting a plot to kidnap some kings!” I said. “Oh, Thusis, you are the limit!”

“I know I am,” she said naïvely. “A mind that does not range to its extremest limits is a rather dull one, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I admitted, laughing and crushing her hands between my own. “You are delightfully right, Thusis; you are always deliciously right. I don’t know who you are except that you’re the lovely and mysterious Laughing Girl. What else you may be I don’t know, dearest, but you are doubtless somebody or the King of Italy wouldn’t bother his clever head about you and your sister.”

“He does bother, I am afraid,” admitted Thusis, smiling. “I’m sorry we’ve been obliged to annoy him. But it couldn’t be helped, because we differed, politically, with the King of Italy. And we ran away from Rome to prove to him that our conception of world-politics was right and his was wrong. And we expect him, some day, to be very grateful to us—because we really are, Clelia and I, two of his most loyal subjects.”

She spoke so frankly, so earnestly, that I dared make no jest of what she said.

However, I think she saw a glimmer in my eyes, for she flushed.

“Nothing,” she said, “is sacred to a Yankee. Let me go.”

“Shall I tell you what is sacred to a Yankee, Thusis?” said I, retaining her hands.

“No!”

“I’ll tell you all the same: liberty of mind!—liberty within law!—liberty within the frontiers of conscience.”

“Then you do not deny these privileges to me?”

“They are yours, Thusis. No man can deny essential rights and liberties.”

“You believe I have a right to act as my conscience dictates?”

“Absolutely.”

“To run away from authority?”

“If your mind approves.”

“And—and devote my life—risk it—to free my native land and restore to my sovereign what once belonged to him?”

“Naxos?”

“Yes.”

I said gravely: “If, in your self-dedication to this work there be no ulterior motive;—if you undertake this unselfishly, and with a heart clean of all personal ambition—then, Thusis, I say, go on! ... And I am at your service.”

Twice she started to speak, and hesitated. In her clear eyes, so intently, almost painfully fixed on mine, I saw she was fiercely pondering my words. Her intense and youthful seriousness in her concentration held me fascinated. And for a little while neither one of us stirred.

And it gradually began to appear to me that what I had said to her had suddenly opened to her young and ardent eyes a totally new view of some things in the world with which she had, perhaps, believed herself thoroughly familiar.

She turned from her absorption; and now she was presented to me in profile with downcast eyes and bitten lip, and a least relaxation of her slender figure which had been so straight and rigid.

It was becoming evident that she had nothing further to say to me, —no reply to make to what I had rather ponderously propounded as an ethical axiom.

But, as responding to the restless pressure, I released her hands, she turned back and stood looking at me out of painfully perplexed eyes—eyes that lacked no courage, either, yet doubted, now, almost wistfully.

Then, not speaking, she unlocked my door and went out.

Smith knocked at the doorway communicating between our apartments, and came in at my absent-minded invitation.

“Of course you’re not in this, are you, Michael?” he inquired.

“We weren’t asked. Besides, there are too many men now, and the Queen wants Thusis, Clelia, and Josephine Vannis to serve dinner in costume and join the party afterward.”

“Are they going to do it?” he asked, surprised and amused.

“I don’t know ... Tell me, Smith, whom do you suspect Thusis to be? I can see you have some theory concerning Clelia—some idea. Haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Would you care to share it with me?”

“Yes. But I can’t.”

“Could you tell me why you can’t?”

“I think I may tell you that much. The King of Italy requested me to maintain silence in the possible event of my discovering the identity of Thusis and Clelia. I am here on the King’s service, with certain definite orders. I shall scrupulously observe these orders. Among these is his request concerning the identity of these two charming young girls.”

“Just one thing, then. Have you discovered the identity of Thusis?”

“No.”

“Of Clelia?”

He reddened. “Yes, I have,” he said. “Or rather she has confirmed what I had begun to suspect.”

“Clelia has told you who she is!” I exclaimed.

“She has.”

“Isn’t that disobedience of orders?”

“She told me before I could stop her. I never dreamed she was going to tell me. It came out—like a bolt of lightning—while I—I was—slipping over her finger that ring I used to wear——”

“She wears it!”

“Yes. She was glorious. She——”