For a second the Emperor’s eyes had flashed with a haughty surprise which gave Fessenden a passing glimpse of outraged majesty, but he recovered himself swiftly, and before the plaint finished he had sprung to his feet and grasped Fessenden’s hand, looking like a contrite school-boy.
“I beg your pardon,” he stammered. “How inhospitable!—I never was so tactless in my life. But you have interested me so deeply. You are the most extraordinary young man—will you forgive me? and will you do me the honor to return for dinner? Mr. Abbott comes too.”
A warm responsiveness rushed through Fessenden’s veins and flashed from his frank impatient eyes; and he returned the hearty grasp of the other’s hand. But although the two men were mutually and strongly attracted, almost to the point of effusiveness, they nevertheless, and almost unconsciously, stared hard and long at each other. For the moment, despite aggressive differences, they looked alike. Their personalities pushed aside the mask of their features and snatched the knowledge that for them it was love or hate, friendship or enmity, mutual assistance or a bitter lifelong struggle, which might waste their energies and thwart their most passionate hopes.
William was the older and subtler. He laid his hand affectionately on his new friend’s shoulder. “I have suspected something of your father’s ultimate plans for you,” he said. “Now I am sure. I can help you as much as you can help me. The next time we are alone, turn the tables and ask me as many questions as you like. There is no reason why you should ever remind yourself that I am an Emperor—why our friendship should not be as informal and sincere as that of your charming sister and the daughter of the Emperor of Austria.”
“Do you know my sister?”
“Of course, and since she was twelve years old. But her chosen friend is my sworn enemy.”
That night, in the retirement of his state-room, Fessenden brushed his hair backward and his mustache upright. The Emperor at dinner had drawn his coils more closely. He had been brilliant, demonstrative, instructive, humorous, almost unegotistical. He had made Fessenden shine without asking a question, and he had toasted Mr. Abbott in the effusive rhetoric with which one ripened sovereign disguises his fear of another. Fessenden forgot his long array of self-made heroes—even those who had been cradled in purple and yet ridden victoriously through the pages of history. He took up an autographed picture of William, presented at parting, and studied it attentively, then regarded his own smooth young face with dissatisfaction.
“However,” he thought, “in his earlier photographs he had even less character than I have. It’s since he got his own way that he’s put it on with a brush. I suppose I can have that eagle roll of the eye in time, too, if I choose, and square my iron jaw, and look as if I were hewn out of finely tempered steel. He has a sensitive mouth, all the same.”
In a moment he parted his short hair rapidly and brushed his mustache into a dejected curve. “I’d like to see myself!” he thought, with some irritation. “He would have the laugh on me to-morrow!”