She laughed sharply, walking up and down that long hall—laughed and cried, and then stumbled into a chair, and began sobbing desperately. I felt helpless before this phase of feminine grief. She wanted to talk, to tell us about it all, and yet just telling was too much for her. I patted her shoulder, awkwardly, I fear, and motioned John back when I saw him start for the bell. That, I was sure, was not the right thing to do. Helena wanted to confide in people of her own sort. She had been among her Rheatian servants too long, and lonely. We had arrived at an opportune time. Soon she would stop crying and feel better. I had seen women in hysterics before.
And I was right. In a few minutes she sat up straight again. “Yes, Marie,” she said, quite calmly. “The girl I called my daughter, Maria Lalena, Princess of Alaria. Queen of Alaria, now, if God is being gracious to her.”
“You mean,” I asked, trying to remember all I could of Marie, “you never had a daughter?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “I had a daughter. But my Marie—died, and Yolanda gave Maria Lalena to me to bring up. It was her idea. We all thought, then, that the monarchy would fall any day, with only a boy on the throne, and a bad boy at that. I went to Yolanda in her grief. A lonely widow, bereft of her child, to another lonely woman in a worse plight.”
“I didn’t know she was a friend of yours,” I said.
“Since she is a queen it is more correct to put it the other way,” she said. “She has honored me with her friendship ever since my marriage. I am probably the only intimate she has, because I am the only one who has no political interest in her, but only a personal one. I have not even profited in a social way, since I have lived here so quietly, in order not to attract attention to Maria Lalena.”
“That’s why I haven’t seen you,” I put in.
“Yes. You haven’t seen me since I was in Paris with Marie. Poor Marie. To me she is merged in Maria Lalena. It is as though they were one person and my child. I have loved her like my own child. And then this noon—was it only this noon?—it seems a week ago, at least—they phoned to send Marie. I wanted to go with her, but Yolanda said it was best not, so I sent her alone in my car, and the car has not come back. Oh, we have been so careful of her. She has not been in Herrovosca since the day she came here, after the awful affair of that bomb. Think what it must have meant to her today, to brave the mob in that square, with Conrad beside her, her only spokesman.”
“Poor child,” John said, “but she looked very calm and very charming, and Conrad was really nice about it.”
“He’s not to be trusted. Not to be trusted for a moment.”