“Three aces! Your majesty is in luck! Shall we make it a jack-pot?”
King Rudolph XII., of Hesse-Heilfels, solemnly acquiesced in this suggestion by a nod of his gray head. His small, greenish-gray eyes gleamed with excitement, and the flush on his heavily moulded face bore witness to the wicked joy he was deriving from a new game of chance. Rudolph was a true Schwartzburger in his fondness for gambling. There is a legend of the Rhine which tells how one of Rudolph’s lineal ancestors, who occupied the throne of Hesse-Heilfels three centuries ago, lost his kingdom on a throw of the dice and his honor by a thrust of the sword. The courtier who had won a kingdom from his liege lord did not live to tell the tale of his good luck. The house of Schwartzburger has never neglected heroic measures when it has been confronted by a great crisis. To gamble with a king of Hesse-Heilfels has always required not only skill but courage.
That Jonathan Edwards Bennett, a rolling stone from Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States of America, had dared to teach King Rudolph of Hesse-Heilfels the mysteries of the American game of poker, spoke well for the Yankee adventurer’s boldness. One of the first stories that Bennett had been told upon entering Rudolph’s kingdom had turned upon the fate of a commercial traveller from the United States who had managed to penetrate to the sacred presence of the testy monarch. The drummer had offered to equip the army of Hesse-Heilfels with bicycles at so low a figure that the suspicions of King Rudolph had been aroused. Becoming convinced by a series of searching questions that the commercial traveller could not fulfil the promises he had made, the proud but irascible Schwartzburger confiscated the Yankee’s watch and loose change. He then gave orders that the stranger be driven beyond the borders of the kingdom. Rudolph XII. prided himself upon always being just, though he might be at times severe.
King Rudolph of Hesse-Heilfels and Jonathan Edwards Bennett of Connecticut played poker amid luxurious and romantic surroundings. The favorite castle of the Schwartzburgers caps a hill overlooking the distant Rhine, but somewhat out of the beaten line of travel. The Schwartzburgers have always cherished a dislike for tourists, and under Rudolph XII. the little kingdom of Hesse-Heilfels has been jealously guarded from the prying eyes of fussy travellers, who, as His Majesty had often remarked, were apt to lead the good people of the country into temptation. Four hundred years ago a Schwartzburger who had been crowned king of Hesse-Heilfels had said: “The divine right to fleece resides in the person of the king, and when exercised by a subject becomes treason.” One of the most learned professors at the University of Heidelberg some years ago wrote a treatise to prove that this remark was, on the face of it, an Irish bull, and could not, therefore, have been uttered by a King of Hesse-Heilfels. A great controversy over this question arose in the German universities, and the matter is still under discussion. It has served at least one valuable purpose, in furnishing another outlet for pent-up erudition. German scholarship needs constant relief of this kind, and what is known as the Schwartzburger Irish-Bull problem has been of great service to the congested erudition of the university towns.
The castle of the Schwartzburgers in which we find the reigning king pursuing his studies in poker under the tutorship of a wandering genius from Connecticut was built late in the thirteenth century, and “was restored,” as the guide-books say, early in the present century by King Rudolph’s father. “The restoration is incomplete,” Bennett had said to the king, a few days after he had been admitted to the royal circle. “Your castle is picturesque but unhealthy, romantic but rheumatic, with too many relics and too few conveniences. What you need at once, your majesty, is sanitary plumbing, a few passenger and freight elevators, and an electric lighting plant.”
King Rudolph had gazed suspiciously at the smooth-faced, smooth-tongued youth, whose nervously energetic manner was aggravated by his efforts to make his meaning clear in the German tongue. Bennett was a well-equipped linguist, but the German dialect spoken in Hesse-Heilfels was new to him. He was by temperament loquacious and restless, and it annoyed him to find that his vocabulary was frequently defective when he was endeavoring to convince the king that a certain line of action was imperatively and immediately necessary. King Rudolph had rejected, for the time being, the suggestions thrown out by Bennett regarding repairs to the castle, and had devoted such hours as he could snatch from affairs of state to learning the ins and outs of the game of draw poker. The result was that Rudolph XII. and Jonathan Edwards Bennett spent twelve hours of every twenty-four in the king’s private apartments—with royalty and democracy separated by only a table, a pack of cards, and a set of ivory chips. Already the kingdom had begun to feel the effects of Rudolph’s example, for the palace sets the fashions in Hesse-Heilfels, and when the king plays poker in his castle the peasant in the valley is anxious to learn the difference between a royal flush and a full house. When Jonathan Edwards Bennett taught Rudolph XII., the reigning Schwartzburger, to play jack-pots he started a poker avalanche that poured down from the castle into the valleys and eventually caused the most serious upheaval in the modern history of the kingdom of Hesse-Heilfels.
“If your luck continues, your majesty,” remarked Bennett, as he shuffled the cards and gazed thoughtfully through the open window toward the distant mountain-tops, “I shall be compelled to mortgage my farm in Litchfield County, Connecticut.”
There was silence in the stately old chamber for a moment, broken only by the ticking of an antique clock that had punctuated the lives of many generations of Schwartzburgers. King Rudolph thrust a trembling hand through his scanty gray locks and smiled slyly.
“What’s the farm worth?” he asked, eagerly seizing his five cards and looking at them anxiously.