Her Serene Highness: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

“But certainly not. Even if we did that sort of thing, we couldn’t deceive any of your rich countrymen or any of the English with it. The story is too well known. No; we bought it for His Royal Highness the Grand Duke of Zweitenbourg. It is—or he thinks it is—a portrait of one of his Spanish ancestors. His agent tells me that it is the only known work of a remarkable young Spaniard who was soon afterwards killed at the siege of Barcelona, early in the eighteenth century. They are not even sure of his name. The Grand Duke was most anxious to get it. For years we have been sending him semiannual bulletins on Monsieur Acton’s health and financial condition.”

Grafton’s heart sank. Here was a true collector—a past-master of the art. “If I hadn’t been a mere novice,” thought Grafton, “I, too, would have had bulletins on Acton, and a standing order. As it is, my trouble has only begun,” for, being himself a true collector, with all the fatalism of the collector’s temperament, he was not despairing, was only the more resolute in face of these new difficulties.

“His Royal Highness,” continued Candace, “wants the picture because it fills one of the gaps in his gallery of ancestral portraits.” Under skilful questioning, Candace yielded the further information that the keeper of the Grand Duke’s privy purse, Baron Zeppstein, would arrive the following Thursday personally to escort the picture to Zweitenbourg.

It reached Paris on Tuesday, and Grafton took Jack Campbell, whom he found at the Ritz, round to Candace’s on Wednesday morning. Campbell, having been thoroughly coached, made offers for several pictures, all too low, then pretended to fall in love with the Spaniard. He insisted that it was a Velasquez—Grafton seemed to be disgusted with him, somewhat ashamed of him. When Candace told him that the picture was sold, he had them send a telegram to the Grand Duke offering eight thousand dollars for it. A curt refusal to sell at any price came a few hours later.

Campbell and Grafton were there the next morning when Baron Zeppstein came. As he was voluble, and appreciative of the rare pleasure of an attentive listener, Grafton rapidly ingratiated himself, and soon had him flowing on the subject of “my royal master.”

“His Royal Highness has two passions,” said the Baron, “Americans and his pictures. You Americans are making astonishing—I may say appalling—inroads in Germany; your ideas are getting even into the heads of our women, our girls. I don’t like it; I don’t like it. It’s breeding a race of thinking women. I can’t endure a thinking woman. You can’t imagine what I’m suffering just now through Her Serene Highness; but no matter. Your terrible democratic ideas of disrespect for tradition, for institutions, for restraints, are slipping about even in the palaces of our kings. His Royal Highness—the story goes that he was in love with one of your beautiful countrywomen and that she refused to marry him; she did marry his brother, Duke Wolfgang—morganatically, of course. It would be impossible for one of the house of Traubenheim to marry a commoner in the regular way. Your American invasion hasn’t extended that far—”

“And the pictures?” interrupted Grafton, impatient of the digression.

“Ah—yes—there His Royal Highness has a high enthusiasm, a noble passion. He is positively mad about Rembrandts. He has a notable collection of them, and is always trying to add to it.”

Grafton’s eyes dropped; he feared that this simple old Zweitenbourgian might read his thoughts. “Rembrandts?” he said. “That interests me. I have the same craze in a small way.” And he drew the Baron on. He learned that a Rembrandt filled the Grand Duke with the same burning longing for possession with which his craze, the spurious Velasquez, was now filling him. He began to see victory. He cabled his Chicago agent to send him forthwith, in care of Candace Brothers, his two examples of Rembrandt’s early work. When he was a boy, travelling about with his father, he had found them in an obscure shop in Leyden. They now interested him little except as reminders of an early triumph. But to a collector of Rembrandts they would be treasures.

A few days after sending the cable he went in the morning with Mrs. Campbell to Paquin’s—Mrs. Campbell was at Paris for her annual shopping. She was to be fitted for six dresses, she explained, and that meant an hour—perhaps two or three hours. But Grafton was so attracted by the scene that he said he would wait, at least until he was tired. He seated himself on the sofa against the wall, near the door. It was in line with the passage-way into which the fitting-salons open.