“My dear Ernestine, I don’t care what the means may be, so long as the result is satisfactory, which it is not at present. Your boy wants discipline. If his father had lived, his authority would have reinforced yours.”
The word “discipline” was an unfortunate one, for Ernestine’s thoughts flew at once to the poor little Hercynian Princes whose woes the Princess of Dardania had described so feelingly. “I like Michael to be happy and free,” she said. “I will not have him turned into a miniature drill-sergeant.”
“No one wishes him to be, but he ought to feel that there is some authority he must recognise. It is not only you and the other women who spoil him, Ernestine, but Batzen and the rest as well. The other day I caught him imitating poor old Batzen to his face, with Pavlovics and two of the pages looking on and laughing at him.”
“How can they help it when he is so quaint? He picks up things in the most extraordinary way. You want to crush all the fun out of him.”
“My dear Ernestine, you seem to think that I have some personal feeling in the matter. Please leave me out of account. What I am anxious about is the future. The boy is a king already. There are plenty of people, and always will be, to flatter and encourage him, but if he once gets out of hand we shall never be able to train him properly. And what will the result be? I am not exactly what any one would call straitlaced, but I don’t mind saying that even you have seen enough of the world to know that he will simply rush to ruin. He must learn to obey—to subordinate his own wishes to those of others—if he is ever to rule. I only wish we could have sent him to an English public school. The games, and the association with other boys, would have done him a world of good.”
“I knew it!” cried Ernestine, almost in tears. “I knew you wanted him to be brought up in that barbarous English way, without even the necessaries of life, and to break all his limbs at football.”
“Don’t misrepresent me, please. I know that the English school is out of the question, unfortunately. Nor would I wish to take him entirely out of your hands at his present age. All I wanted to do was to appoint a military man as his governor, with authority to raise a small cadet corps of little boys with whom the King could work and drill, and learn something of discipline. Other lessons would follow, of course, and other instructors be necessary, but Michael would not find it such a change if things were done in this gradual way, and if the other boys shared all his work and play.”
“That can all come later. He is too young at present. I give way to you very often, Cyril; but I must stand firm in this. I know that it is a temptation to let you regulate Michael’s education for me as you do everything else; but I must not yield to it. I am his mother, and I must use my own judgment in dealing with him. I could not bear that his spirit should be broken at his age. Oh, yes; I know that he is precocious; but that only means that he needs more care and tenderness than other boys. You mean well; but how can you enter into a mother’s feelings?”
“Very well; don’t worry about it,” said Cyril, accepting the situation with easy philosophy when he saw that her resolution was fixed. “I was only anxious for the child’s own good, so don’t blame me if he turns out badly.”
He shrugged his shoulders as he went away, reflecting that even the most sensible of women would make fools of themselves over a child, and Ernestine—as he had long known—was not one of the most sensible of women. It was just like her to look at things in this absurd way, and he was sorry he had wasted his time and wounded her maternal feelings to no purpose. After all, as she said, she left everything else in his hands, and if she chose to ruin her boy by over-indulgence, that was her own affair. Long afterwards, in looking back at this time, Cyril reflected cynically that in the matter of King Michael’s education he must have been afflicted with judicial blindness, for it did not occur to him that it must have needed an external stimulus to rouse Ernestine to such strong opposition to his views. Had it done so, he would have known where to look for the intrusive force; but he was content to ascribe her perverseness to her own character, and the part which the Princess of Dardania had played in the matter remained unsuspected.