At last Henry’s facts were considered firmly enough implanted to justify a move; and in September the prince and Monkley sat down to compose their preliminary letter to Sir Francis Hurndale. Sylvia by now was so much accustomed to the behavior of her companions that she never thought seriously about the fantastic side of the affair. Her own masquerade as a boy had been passed off so successfully even upon such an acute observer as Jimmy, until her father had let out the secret by a slip of the tongue, that she had no qualms about being accepted as a king. She realized that money was to be made out of it; but the absence of money had already come to seem a temporary discomfort, to relieve which people in a position like her own and her father’s had no reason to be scrupulous. Not that she really ever bothered her head with the morality of financial ways and means. When she spent the ten-franc piece that she thought she had found, the wrong had lain in unwittingly depriving her mother whom she loved; if she had not loved her mother she might have still had scruples about stealing from her; but stealing from people who had plenty of money and with whom there was no binding link of affection would have been quite incomprehensible to her. Therefore the sight of Jimmy Monkley and her father and the Prince de Condé sitting round a spindle-legged tea-table in this new house that smelled pleasantly of varnish was merely something in a day’s work of the life they were leading, like a game of cards. It was a much jollier life than any she had yet known; her alliance with Jimmy had been a very good move; her father was treated as he ought to be treated by being kept under; she was shortly going to have some more clothes.
Sylvia sat watching the trio, thinking how much more vividly present Jimmy seemed to be than either of the other two—the prince with his greenish complexion never really well shaved, and his turn-down collars that made his black suit more melancholy, or her father with his light, plaintive eyes and big ears. She was glad that she was not going to resemble her father except perhaps in being short and in the shape of her wide nose; yet she was not really very short; it was only that her mother had been so tall; perhaps, too, when her hair grew long again her nose would not seem so wide.
The letter was finished and Jimmy was reading it aloud:
SIR,—I have the honor to ask if, in the probable event of a great dynastic change taking place in one of the chief countries of Europe, you would welcome the post of court painter, naturally at a suitable remuneration. If you read the daily papers, as no doubt you do, you will certainly have come to the conclusion that neither the present ruling house nor what is known as the Carlist party had any real hold upon the affections of the Spanish people. Verb. sap. Interesting changes may be foreshadowed, of which I am not yet at liberty to write more fully. Should you entertain the proposal I shall be happy to wait upon you with further particulars.
I have the honor to be, sir,
Your obedient servant,
JOSEPHE-ERNESTE,
PRINCE DE CONDÉ.
“Do you know what it sounds like?” said Henry. “Mind I’m not saying this because I didn’t write the letter myself. It sounds to me like a cross between a prophecy in Old Moore’s Almanack and somebody trying to sell a patent knife-cleaner.”
“There’s a good deal in what you say,” Monkley agreed, in rather a dissatisfied tone.
Henry was so much flattered by the reception of his criticism that he became compassionate to the faults of the letter and tried hard to point out some of its merits.
“After all,” said Jimmy, “the great thing is that the prince has signed it. If his name doesn’t draw Master Godfrey, no letters are going to. We’ll send it off as it is.”
So the letter was sent. Two days afterward the prince arrived with the news that Godfrey Hurndale had called upon him and that he had been inexpressibly happy at the prospect of meeting the de jure King of France and Spain.