Kings in Adversity

by Edward S. Van Zile

The princess understood him, and her eyes were sympathetic as they met his. “But an old castle has its advantages,” she remarked, with forced gayety. “It is crystallized history, is it not? Furthermore, it may offer a place of refuge in time of trouble.”

“Ah,” said Bennett, loyal to his American prejudices, “that is just the point. In my country, we need no underground cellars to escape the wrath of man. We use them for another purpose. But don’t think me narrow-minded, Your Highness. I appreciate the advantages your country offers to the tourist, to the lover of romance, but, as a place of residence, I must admit that I prefer Litchfield County to Hesse-Heilfels.”

The Princess Hilda sat silent for a moment. Her mind dwelt upon the ruin this man had wrought in the land she loved. She had been forced to the conclusion that the disaster he had brought to Hesse-Heilfels had been the outcome not of malice, but of mischance. Nevertheless, he had been the motive force, at the outset, that had overthrown the régime of which she was a part. How far was it becoming for her to accept his friendship? She could not answer. Of her own free-will she had thrown down the barrier between them, and it was too late, perhaps, to reconstruct it.

The Princess Hilda was only eighteen years of age. The full significance of the political revolution of which she was a victim had not yet come to her. Had she possessed a wider and deeper experience of the ways of the world, the embarrassments that surrounded her would have impressed her more deeply. But she was very young, and, it is the peril and the privilege of youth to make light of difficulties that appear insuperable to the eyes of maturity. Furthermore, the princess was undergoing a novel experience that possessed for her a dangerous fascination. The rigid etiquette of the old-fashioned court in which she had spent her girlhood had precluded the possibility of frank and sympathetic intercourse with young men. An American girl of eighteen is apt to be as wise as a serpent, though harmless as a dove. She is sure of herself. She takes pride in the conviction that she understands men. What she has failed to learn of the peculiarities of human nature from experience, she has derived from literature and the drama. She makes her début in society a full-fledged woman of the world. If she is clever, her epigrams are as pointed at eighteen as they will be at twenty-eight.

But a German princess develops more slowly. She is hedged around by safeguards erected on the theory that there should be no royal road to worldliness. She is moulded by ceremonies and fashioned by precedents. She is deprived by birth of the divine right to choose a husband. At eighteen she has become merely a more or less ornamental piece in a royal game of chess. The American girl of the same age is years older than the German princess.

Let it not be imagined, however, that Jonathan Edwards Bennett found the Princess Hilda of Hesse-Heilfels too young and unsophisticated to be interesting. While her recent experiences may not have assumed in her mind their ultimate significance, they had had, nevertheless, a marked effect in changing her mental attitude toward many subjects. At one blow she had been thrust into an entirely new relationship to the universe at large. Heretofore, she had been led to believe that the sun rose and set merely for her own royal pleasure and profit. Suddenly even the light of that luminary had been denied to her. The immediate effect of this deprivation had been educational. For the first time in her life she had been brought face to face with the fact that royalty itself is subject to the chastisement that fate so freely bestows upon lesser mortals.

“Tell me, Herr Bennett,” she said after a time, glancing significantly at the poker-players in the centre of the room, “what will be the outcome of all this? We can’t live here all our days. I should become an old woman in a year if I could never see the sun, never hear the wind among the trees.”

A smile played across her shapely mouth, but her eyes were sad as they looked up at the pale, handsome face above her.

“Do you know, your royal highness,” said Bennett, lowering his voice, confidentially, “I have come to the conclusion that the solution of the puzzle rests with Cousin Fritz. It is a novel experience for me to suspend my own judgment and trust to another man to get me out of difficulties, but the little madcap’s cleverness and loyalty have had a hypnotic effect upon my will. More and more do I find myself inclined to follow his lead, to await his commands, and to trust to his ingenuity to get us out of this amazing scrape.”

The Princess Hilda assented. “Cousin Fritz,” she said, “has become, I fear, our only hope. What he can do for us now I can’t imagine, but, Herr Bennett, there is some satisfaction in the thought that we can never be worse off than we are at present.”