With a graceful gesture Conrad dropped the offending luxury into a tray on the desk, and bowed, ceremoniously. Bela swaggered in his sarcasm like an angry schoolboy. If he could have spit fire he would have been pleased to do it, I am sure.
“I was never amused by affairs of state,” he went on, his small boy’s fury mounting, minute by minute, “so we will not spend too much of my time on the matters before us. It would seem that several people wish to rule this small and undesirable portion of Europe. Some of you I have even seen wax quite sentimental over the place. I think it fit for breeding pigs, and it has certainly been used extensively for the purpose.” He stopped a moment to show his fangs while we had time to digest his stupid venom. “I have had three days away from my mother lately, for the first time in eight years, and I really enjoyed them. Also, I did some thinking.”
“Also for the first time in eight years?” Conrad asked in a mild voice.
“Silence!” Bela ordered angrily. “I have come to a decision. Probably you will all be astonished. I am only sorry that I must please you in this. I can think of no way out of that. According to the constitution of Alaria I am, with a few restrictions, the absolute ruler of this country. I can do everything except imprison men without a fair trial in due course of law. My subjects have relegated that privilege to themselves. They do not even limit themselves to ordinary people who would not be missed. They imprison their King. If it had not been that they are careless, and that Americans are thoughtless meddlers, I should still be languishing in a tower room with a splendid view of the particular mountain where the Black Ghost has his eyrie. I could see the heliograph signals he sent to my very disloyal subjects, the Visichiches.”
“Your Majesty,” Count Visichich bowed, apologetically, “the disloyalty I readily admit, but if the eyrie of the Black Ghost were on the mountain to which you refer we should have lodged Your Majesty somewhere with a less extensive view. The mountain to which you refer is merely a convenient point from which the signals are relayed to a few of his many strongholds.”
And I had wasted an hour’s sleep drawing a picture of that peak.
“Indeed?” Bela shivered with temper, and slapped a book down on the desk before him so hard that it bounced up again a full two inches. “These children’s games,” he went on, “are of very little importance. I do not even seek to punish you, since I am not permitted your license, and I have no stomach for the slow law. If I could see a way to clap you all into tower rooms and dungeons, I would leave you to rot there. My ancestors devised excellent and most suitable tortures for disloyal subjects. I should enjoy reviving them but I have more important things to occupy me. I have made two momentous decisions. Momentous for Alaria. The first concerns my too competent and intriguing mother, the most ubiquitous Queen in Europe. Just what part she played in my imprisonment I do not know. I was trying to make her tell me when this girl,” he made a motion toward Maria Lalena, “started such a hullaballoo outside this door that I retired until the matter should have been attended to. Something about a bomb and a riot at the gate. My suspicion remains unsatisfactorily denied. It does not matter. She was, in any case, far too ready with a substitute for me.” He turned to Yolanda insolently. “You,” he said. “While I thought you devoted to me, I could forgive your assumption of power, but now that I know that your devotion was only to your own place in the world I do not forgive you anything. While I can still issue commands you will leave Alaria, never to return. Go now. I have ordered a car and four soldiers to accompany you. Your maids can follow with your personal belongings. You are to leave immediately.” He banged hard at the bell on the desk. When the servant answered he spit two words at him, and an officer appeared. Yolanda was staring at him unbelievingly, but his large wet mouth was curled back in so ugly a snarl that she read the answer to any plea she might make without further words.
“The devil take you!” she cried, letting her anger mar her carefully built-up theatricalism. “I hope you fail as ignominiously as you would have done many times during the last eight years if I had not guided and protected you. I provided against all contingencies, not your death alone. I foresaw this also, and provided against it with good American government bonds. Quite a lot of them. I shall live very comfortably in Switzerland or England or anywhere else that shall please me, and I hope you all may have as bad luck as my ungrateful son will surely bring upon himself.”
She swept out of the room without any other farewell, her long crepe veil brushing against the son for whom she had donned it a little prematurely.
Bela laughed as the door closed. Then he turned back to Prince Conrad. “Now I shall really surprise you,” he said. “I have decided to do what I have always wished, and what now seems to have become a necessity if I am to have any pleasure at all. I have decided to abdicate. You will be so glad of that that you will pay me four million francs a year for the rest of my life.”