Among the many road-scouts, with their red discs, in that vicinity he had become extremely popular on account of his generosity in tips, while to the police with his ugly grey low-built car with its two seats behind the long bonnet he was a perpetual source of annoyance.
Though he never exceeded the speed limit—in sight of the police—yet his open exhaust roared and throbbed, while his siren was the most ear-piercing of any on the road. A little bit of business up in Staffordshire which he had recently brought to a successful issue by the aid of the faithful Charles, the Parson, and Mr Max Mason, had placed them all in funds, and while the worthy Bayswater vicar was taking his ease at the “Majestic” up at Harrogate—where, by the way, he had become extremely popular among his fellow guests—Mason was at the Bath at Bournemouth for a change of air.
To the guests at Harrogate the Rev. Thomas Clayton had told the usual tale which seems to be on the lips of every cleric, no matter how snug his living—that of the poor parish, universal suffering, hard work, small stipend, ailing wife and several small children. Indeed, he admitted to one or two of the religious old ladies whose acquaintance he had made, that some of his wealthier parishioners, owing to his nervous breakdown, had subscribed in order to send him there for a month’s holiday.
Thus he had become indispensable to the tea-and-tattle circle, and the ladies soon began to refer to him as “that dear Mr Clayton.” With one of them, a certain wealthy widow named Edmondson, he had become a particular favourite, a fact which he had communicated in a letter to the good-looking motorist now living at the pretty wayside inn in front of the lake on the Ripley Road.
While the Parson was enjoying a most decorous time with the philanthropic widow, Dick Drummond, as he soon became known, had cultivated popularity in the motor-world. To men in some walks of life, and especially to those on the crooked by-paths, popularity is a very dangerous thing. Indeed, as the Prince had on many occasions pointed out in confidence to me, his popularity greatly troubled him, making it daily more difficult for him to conceal his identity.
At that moment, because he had lowered a record at Brooklands, he was living in daily terror of being photographed, and having his picture published in one or other of the illustrated papers. If this did occur, then was it not more than likely that somebody would identify Dick Drummond the motorist, with the handsome Prince Albert of Hesse-Holstein?
He led a life of ease and comfort in all else, save this constant dread of recognition, and was seriously contemplating a sudden trip across the Channel with a run through France and Germany when he one morning received a registered letter bearing the Harrogate postmark.
He read it through half a dozen times. Then he burned it.
Afterwards he lit a “Petroff” and went out for a stroll in the sunshine along the road towards Ripley village.
“It’s really wonderful how clerical clothes and a drawling voice attract a woman. They become fascinated, just as they do when they meet a Prince. By Jove!” he laughed merrily to himself. “What fools some women—and men, too, for the matter of that—make of themselves! They never trouble to institute inquiry, but accept you just at your own value. Take myself as an instance! In all these four years nobody has ever discovered that I’m not Prince Albert. Nobody has taken the trouble to trace the real prince to his safe abode, the Sanatorium of Wismar. Yet the great difficulty is that I cannot always remain a prince.”