“I have served Mr. Schwartz as he tried to serve you, father dear,” I replied. “As for Prince John, he offered the man who stole the ju-ju ten thousand pounds if it were given back, so I saw no harm in arranging that half the amount should be paid to you. In any case, I always meant the poor black people to have it. It was a very great shame for Mr. Schwartz to take from them a thing which they thought so much of.”
For a little while he could say nothing. Like me, he was watching the black prince, who really treated that absurd—I mean that extraordinary scrap of carved ivory, as if it were the most precious article in the world. It might have been all one blazing diamond by the reverent way he handled it. When he was quite sure that it was his own ju-ju—and he did not take for granted, like Schwartz, that it was the genuine thing until he had looked at every mark—he pressed its funny monkey face to his lips, his forehead, and his breast. He paid not the least heed to us or what we were saying. It was not until he had produced a small, finely woven mat from the pocket in which he kept the notes, and wrapped the ju-ju in it before putting it away, that he gave us any attention.
Of course, Dad started a second time to talk as if he were at a Conservative meeting.
“It has given me the greatest pleasure to observe that my—er—daughter Millicent has restored to you the—er—interesting object which you seem to value so highly, but I need hardly say that—er—the payment of any such—er—astounding reward as five thousand pounds is utterly out of the question.”
“My people pay the money gladly,” said the negro prince, dragging himself up in the grandest way imaginable. “I tell you, too, that your daughter’s name will be honored in my country, and when I and my friends return home we shall not fail to send her other tokens of our regard and good will.”
“We cannot accept this money,” said Dad, firmly.
“It is quite essential that you should,” said the other with equal coolness. “If you refuse it now, I shall simply be compelled to send it to you through the post. We lost our ju-ju owing to the remissness of its guardians. We must atone for that, and the payment must be made in treasure—or blood.”
You can have no idea how he uttered those last two words. He spoke quietly, and in a low voice, but somehow I could feel in them the edge of one of those sharp, heavy choppers—called “machetes,” Polly says—which the maids in the Marquis o’ Granby saw in the negroes’ bedrooms.
So it ended in our shaking hands with Prince John, and in Dad’s bringing the notes into the drawing-room to show them to Mam and the others before he put them away in the silver safe. Everybody made a tremendous fuss over me, and Poll sang “The man who broke the Bank at Monte Carlo,” but I was only too delighted that we had had such a jolly Christmas, and were all good friends again, though it looked rather glum at one time. They made me talk nearly all this story before I went to bed, and I heard old Mr. Stanhope growl that if Dorothy was in such a hurry to get married he didn’t see why she shouldn’t.
Dad did not tell me until long after, but he sent Mr. Schwartz his fifty-five pounds next day, when he also bought me the loveliest bay pony to ride. I christened him “Prince John” when I introduced him to the gang.