“You make no suggestion as to the person to be nominated, Count?” The Emperor turned a keen glance upon Cyril.
“None, sir. It is obvious that the Prince to be chosen must be a man of liberal views, or he would fail to obtain the suffrages of all the Powers, but that is the only suggestion we could venture to offer. I suppose the governor would maintain order, as at present, by the aid of a Moslem guard; but it would be necessary to allow the Jews free access to the spots which they consider holy, and which they are now debarred from approaching. That proviso can hardly fail to commend itself to your Majesty as fair, I think?”
“It is only natural, and would affect no one but the Roumis, I imagine. Well, Count, you have relieved my mind. It will not surprise you to hear that urgent representations against your scheme have been made to me from several quarters, and without this very equitable proposal of yours I should have been forced to fall in with the views they expressed. Now, however, I am able to say that in my opinion you offer adequate protection for Christianity and the Holy Places, and I shall act accordingly. You are taking the waters here, I believe? I am glad to know you are at hand, in case I wish to consult you again on this subject.”
Thus graciously dismissed, Cyril mingled again with the crowd—a crowd that was now as anxious to propitiate as it had hitherto been to ignore him. During the next five minutes, three men, one of whom was the arbiter of fashion, asked him to dinner that night, and the Countess von Hohenthurm vouchsafed him the honour of carrying the paper bag containing her breakfast-roll. Tactless people complained of their bad eyesight, or lamented that they had not heard Count Mortimer was at the baths until this morning, but the tactful simply took up their acquaintance with him at the point where they had dropped it three days before. Cyril met their overtures in the same spirit, and his sole piece of revenge was to tell his entertainers at breakfast all the news of the last three days, as though they had only just arrived—a piece of pleasantry which brought to Mansfield’s face a passing gleam of satisfaction. Cyril took him to task for his lowering brow as they returned to the hotel, and told him that when the Countess von Hohenthurm was so condescending as to show an interest in a young man, it behoved that young man to be grateful, and to look it.
“They are all a set of sycophants!” returned Mansfield sharply. “How you can make friends of them again, I can’t imagine.”
“I don’t make friends of them, but they are fellow-members of society, and it would serve no good purpose to quarrel with them. If I was in their place, I should have acted precisely as they have done.”
“You won’t get me to believe that!” said Mansfield, with an air of mild reproof which Cyril found irresistibly comic.
“Why, how would you have had me mark my sense of their behaviour?” he asked.
“I don’t see how you can meet them again with any cordiality. Why not decline the honour of their further acquaintance?”
“Because we live in the great world, and not in Arcadia. You young people brought up virtuously in England have something terribly stagey about you. You are all for great coups, but that sort of thing doesn’t do in ordinary life. You remind me very much of my brother Caerleon as a young fellow. I don’t think I was ever so ineffably young myself. I hope not, at any rate. Melodrama is not good form.”