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-Wasser.
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 assaulting the police? I couldn't, it would break my heart! I should die of the shame of it."
"Very well," said Charlotte, "I will tell him myself, then; you can't prevent me doing that! No, I'm not going to be headstrong, or foolish, or obstinate, or any of the things you said I was: now I've made the exhibition of myself that I intended making, I'll be a lamb. If I like him enough, and if he likes me enough, I'll marry him. But I shall have to like him a great deal more than I do at present; and he will have to want me very much more than it's possible for him to do until he has seen me——"
"Oh, don't be so conceited, my dear!" said the Queen, her good-humor and confidence beginning to be restored as she watched the fair flushed face, and those queer attractive little gestures which made her daughter's charm so irresistible.
"Before anything will induce me to say 'yes,'" concluded Charlotte.
And then, as though that finished the matter, and as though her own naughty doings were of no further interest, she cried: "And now tell me about the bomb!" And the Queen, who still liked to dwell upon that episode of sights, sounds, and sensations, strangely mingled and triumphantly concluded by a popular ovation such as she had never met with in her life before, started off at once on a detailed narrative, corrected now and then by the King's more sober commentary, and aided by the eager questions of her daughter, who sat in close and fond contact with both of them, mopping her eyes alternately with her mother's handkerchief and her own.
"Oh! why wasn't I there?" she cried incautiously, when word came of the great popular reception crowning all.
"Ah! why weren't you?" inquired the King waggishly. And when he had made that little joke at her, Charlotte knew that all her naughty goings off and goings on were comfortably forgiven and done with.
"But you know, papa," she said later, when for the first time they were alone together, "I have found out quite a lot of things that you know nothing about: quite dreadful things! And they are going on behind your back, and women are being put into prison for it."
All this was said very excitedly, and with great earnestness and conviction.
"My dear," said the King, "it's no use your talking about those Women Chartists to me."
"But I'm one of them," said Charlotte.
"Nonsense; you are not."
"I am. I signed on. I couldn't have gone to prison for them if I hadn't."
"Do any of them know who you are?" cried the King, aghast. It was a disturbing thought, for what a power it would be in their hands, and he had always heard how unscrupulous they were.
"Only one or two," declared Charlotte, "and they won't tell unless I tell them to. They are wonderful people, papa!"
The King sighed; for the very name of them had become a weariness to him. The whole agitation, with its dim confused scufflings against law and order, and its demonstrations idiotically recurring at the most inopportune moments, had profoundly vexed him. Years ago he had received the bland assurance of his ministers that the whole thing would soon die down and cease; but it was still going on, and was now taking to itself worse forms than ever.
"What is it that they want?" he exclaimed, not quite meaning it as a question; rather as expressing the opinion that the subject was a hopeless one.
"They want a great many things," said his daughter; "they've got what they call 'grievances'; I know very little about them; they may be right or wrong—that isn't the point. The only thing that concerns you, papa, is that they want to come and see you; and they are not allowed to."
"Come and see me?"
"Yes; bring you a petition."
"What about?"
"To have their grievances looked into."
"I can't look into their grievances."
"No; but you can say that they shall be."
The King shook his head. Charlotte did not know what she was talking about.
"Yes, papa, that is the position. Of course you haven't the right to make laws or levy taxes, but you can send word to Parliament to say something has got to be considered and decided. And about this, Parliament won't consider and won't decide. And that is why they are trying to get to you with a petition; so that you shall say that it is to be looked into."
"But I can't say that sort of thing, my dear."
"Yes, you can, papa! It's an old right; the right of unrepresented people to come direct to their sovereign and tell him that his ministers are refusing to do things for them. And your ministers are trying to keep you from knowing about it, to keep you from knowing even that you have such a power; and by not knowing it they are making you break your Coronation oath. Oh, papa, isn't that dreadful to think of?"
"My dear, if that were true——"
"But it is true, papa! These women are trying to bring you their petition, and they are prevented. The ministers say that you have nothing to do with it; so they go to the ministers—they take their petition to the ministers, and ask them to bring it to you, so that you may give them an answer. Have any of them brought you the petition, papa?"
The King shook his head.
"You see, they do nothing! And so the women go again, and again, and again, taking their petition with them; and because they are trying to get to you—to say that their grievances shall be looked into, and something done about them—because of that they are being beaten and bruised in the streets; and when they won't turn back then they are arrested and sent to prison."
By this time Charlotte was weeping.
"They may be quite wrong," she cried, "foolish and impossible in their demands; they may have no grievances worth troubling about—though if so, why are they troubling as they do?—but they have the right, under the old law, for those grievances to be inquired into and considered and decided about. And Parliament won't do it; it is too busy about other things, grievances that aren't a bit more real, and about which people haven't been petitioning at all. But you, papa (if that petition came to you), would have the right to make them attend to it. And they know it; and that's why they won't let you hear anything about it."
The King's conscience was beginning to be troubled. He had no confidence either in the good sense or the uprightness of his ministers to fall back upon; and he saw that his daughter, though she knew so little about the merits of the case, was very much in earnest. She had caught his hand and was holding it; she kissed it, and he could feel the dropping of warm tears.
"Very well, my dear," he said, "very well; I promise that this shall be looked into."
"Oh, papa!" she cried joyfully. "It was partly for that—just a little, not all, of course—that I went to prison."
"Then you ought not to have been so foolish. Why could you not have come to me?"
"I don't think you would have attended; not so much as you do now."
And the King had to admit how, perhaps, that was true.
"Well, my dear," he said again, "I promise that it shall be seen to. No, I shan't forget."
And then she kissed him and thanked him, and went away comforted. And when he was alone he got down the index volume of Professor Teller's Constitutional History, and after some search under the heading of "Petitions" found indeed that Charlotte was right, and that the power to send messages to Parliament for the remedying of abuses was still his own.