In his excitement he got upon his feet and trotted about the room, and pausing now and again he gazed ahead with a gloating eye on a whole series of ministerial councils to come. For this monarch, you must remember, had been departmentalized all his life, and to that extent dehumanized; and it was only in a departmental way that he recognized his opportunity. The power to strike which he now visualized came through no intellectual enlargement, no opening up of moral vistas, but only through the discovery that he had on his side a mass of red tape the existence of which he had not previously suspected. In similar trammels to those which had so long hampered and restricted his own movements it was now possible for him to entangle the goings of his ministers. A hundred and one things had been done which were not merely out of order but—oh, blessed word!—unconstitutional; and in consequence the poor dear man's mind was in a welter of delight. At last he had a weapon to his hand whose reach and mechanism he could manipulate. "Oh, dear me, yes!" he said to himself, and said it several times.
When a character of childlike simplicity has got hold of a loaded gun, it has a natural instinct to let it off. The actual direction, and what the target is to be, are not so important as the delightful sense of hearing the gun go off,—of proving by actual demonstration that it really was a loaded and dangerous thing, capable of causing consternation. John of Jingalo was simple, and when he got up from his first solid reading of the Professor's volumes he felt that he was well primed; and his instinct was to let himself go, to spread himself, to attack his enemy with extended front so that they would not know where to have him. Half-a-dozen small tags of red tape gave him a far greater sense of resource and opportunity for aggression than any one good piece of measurable length capable of being well wound and knotted. His powers, such as they were, were largely imitative; and now for some weeks the wordy Max had been coaching him. The Professor had supplied him with the material, Max with the method for applying it; the Professor had given him his head, Max had given him his tongue. Looking forward to the exercise of his new-found powers he meant, in a word, to be voluble; and when in later chapters he becomes yet more surprising, let the reader remember that fortuitous crack at the back of his skull through which the windows of his head were open and his brain-pan a place of draughts wherein any winds of doctrine might blow. A word of opposition, a mere gust of excitement, were now quite enough to set him going, and once started he was very difficult to stop.
For much the same reason, having once started to prance up and down the carpet—that carpet so variegated and Maxian in its pattern—he found it very difficult to sit down again; and would not have done so had not the measured striking of the clock upon the chimney-piece reminded him that he was expecting a visit from Max. Then a curious change came over his deportment; he stood considering, glancing from the telltale volumes upon the table to the door through which he was presently expecting his son to enter. Then with a secretive look and a shake of the head, "Oh, dear me, no," he murmured very softly; and taking up the books he put them away in a drawer and locked it, and, when presently Max came in, said nothing of his new discovery, but sat docile and listened, while the other drew out the shining length of his vocabulary, making words sound like deeds.
Not for nothing was John of Jingalo the son of his father, not for nothing a descendant of kings who so far as they consciously achieved power had always held it possessively and exclusively, withholding the key from their heirs. Post obits were not popular in that royal House of Ganz-Wurst which for two hundred years had ruled over Jingalo.
CHAPTER IX
THE NEW ENDYMION
I
Readers who have hearts will remember that while these things were taking place in the political world, something of more intimate and personal concern had happened to Prince Max. That young man, whose head was so crowded with ideals for others, had discovered—or glimpsed, it would be more correct to say—an ideal of his own, in the shaping of which he had nothing whatever to do. Goddess-like she had descended upon him from skies in which previously he had held no faith at all; and even yet it was a tussle for his conscience to accept anything coming from that quarter as really divine. He was agnostic; he did not like the Church, and he rather despised that attitude of mind which accepted miracle as a directing power in human affairs, and looked to an unseen world for the inspirations of life. It was as though some modern Endymion gazing up at the round and prosaic surface of the moon, and refusing to admit that there entered into its composition anything even of so low a vitality as green cheese—it was as though such an one had seen the affirmed negation suddenly take to itself life and form, and disclose from afar a whole heaven of thoughts, beauties, and aspirations which he had not believed existent. And then, having seen that gracious form so well defined that it must for ever remain imprinted upon his consciousness, he had watched it steal from him into obscurity, wilfully concealing its whereabouts, though ever since the silver haze of that hidden presence had permeated his world.
Concealment and flight are, we know, the very arrows of love when directed with subtle intent against the hunter's heart in man; and they are scarcely less powerful to kindle his ardor when undirected and without purpose, or, as in this case, of a purpose wholly negative and without lure.