I did not take this view of it: I wrote at once to Uselin and entreated him to let me know if the information, which I had received from a very good source, was really true; and I concluded with pressing him once more to give me at last a clear insight into his affairs, since as a man of honor I could no longer endure the present condition of things.
In answer came a long letter, full of complaints of my want of confidence, and of the hard fate of an old man who was deserted by his children, and crammed with wordy boastings about his fifty years' experience in business, about his well-proved good-fortune, and ending with the recommendation than in any event I should write to the prince at once, and ask him if he was still thinking of the purchase of Zehrendorf, or not.
I let the rest of the letter pass, and held to the single fixed point that it contained. I wrote at once to the young prince, who was still with his sick father in Prora, and received in reply an autograph letter to the effect that he had been intending to come to the city, and would carry out this intention at once. He would arrive on Friday at four o'clock, and would be very glad to see me an hour later at the palace, where we could talk over the matter at length.
And so it was to be then. My heart felt heavy at the thought, but I suppressed the emotion and repeated the doctor's aphorism: "what medicines and iron cannot cure, must be cured by fire."
In this half-dejected, half-resolved mood, I went at the appointed day and hour to the palace of the prince.
CHAPTER XXII.
The prince received me with politeness which I might almost call cordial. He had arrived half an hour before, and the journey through the cold winter's day seemed to have done him good; he looked fresh and youthful as I had never seen him before, and in his whole bearing there was such elasticity, such vivacity in his discourse, that I could scarcely recognize in him the wearied dreamer in the old hunting-lodge of Rossow. I could not refrain from congratulating him on this change, which I attributed to his improved health. He seemed pleased to hear it, and said it was high time for him to have outgrown childish distempers.
"I have always resolved," he said, "that when the time came, it should find me a man; and I believe that the time has come. May God long preserve the life of the prince, my father; but by all human reckoning his days are numbered. It may justly be demanded of me that an event which influences the destinies of thousands shall not find me unprepared."
The prince said these words very earnestly. He had been walking up and down the room, and stopped before a portrait which represented a young and very handsome man in a rich and fantastic dress.
"Strange," the prince went on, "that life can play with us thus! See here; this is the portrait of the prince, my father, in his twenty-eighth year. He wore that dress at a masked ball at court, and created an immense furore, and the late queen insisted that he should have his portrait taken in it for her. This is a copy of the original. Do you not find----"