“But you are not satisfied,” said the Queen mournfully. “You think I am devising some plot against yourself and your dear friend M. Drakovics. Cannot you understand that my boy is everything to me? If we were parted—if he were turned against me—it would kill me.”
Cyril was saved the embarrassment of a reply by a violent fumbling at the door. At a sign from the Queen he opened it, and admitted the little King, who ran up to his mother with a headless tin soldier in one hand and a picture-book in the other.
“Little mother, there’s no one to play with me,” he wailed, dropping his toys and climbing into her lap. She gathered him up in her arms, and looked across him at Cyril.
“He is all I have left,” she said reproachfully, “and I am all that he has. You see that he cannot do without me. I rely on you to help me in appointing Fräulein von Staubach. She will not try to separate him from me. You were his father’s friend.”
With another assurance of his full intention of furthering her wishes, Cyril took his departure, laughing silently at the effective tableau which had crowned so opportunely the Queen’s argument.
“Either she is a different creature since Otto Georg’s death,” he said to himself, “or she is the finest actress I know. She used to be simply a jealous wife; at her husband’s death-bed she was a heroine of tragedy; and now she is nothing but a scheming little woman, who hasn’t art enough to conceal the fact that she is a schemer. What a creature of moods she must be! I could have sworn that she would never forgive me that death-bed reconciliation; but though it is disappointing, artistically speaking, that she has stepped down from her tragic pedestal, it will make her much easier to work with if only the phase lasts. But it really is much less interesting. Can it possibly be all acting? Was she merely wearing a mask to-day? But no, it was too clumsy. The transition from hatred to friendliness was not gradual enough to be artistic. No! I see what it is. The Princess, finding her daughter in a state of hot indignation against me on her arrival, has talked at me industriously for the fortnight. At first the Queen agreed with her, then she got bored, and lastly she became indignant. She determined to prove her mother in the wrong by converting the enemy into a friend. If she could succeed, it would justify her for being so weak as to promise she would trust me. Ah, Madame la Princesse! you have done me a service you little intended, simply through not seeing when you had said enough. And as for you, Queen Ernestine, I shall know how to manage you in future. When you are intending to play a very deep game, you shouldn’t show your cards quite so openly.”
But in spite of Cyril’s lack of illusions, the picture of the Queen as he had last seen her recurred to him. Her dark eyes looked tearfully at him over the child’s golden curls and white frock, and her reproachful voice said, “He is all that I have left.” He could only succeed in banishing the impression from his mind by assuring himself that she had arranged for the little King’s appearance at the moment, with a view to the effect to be produced on himself, and even then it was apt to return to him unbidden. This was especially the case one afternoon about a week later, when, looking in at the Premier’s office, he found M. Drakovics sitting idle, gazing into futurity with knitted brows and folded arms.
“Sorry to see that you have something on your mind, monsieur!” was the irreverent greeting which roused the Premier from his brown study. He sat up suddenly, and tried to look as though the shot had not told.
“You are wiser than I am, Count. I am not aware that there is anything special on my mind at present.”
“No?” asked Cyril, with a note of concern in his voice. “And yet such sudden lapses of memory as this are a bad sign, surely?” and he met M. Drakovics’s frown with a gaze of bland unconsciousness.