Leaping to the curtain which concealed the sword, he s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and smashed it across his knee. "See, then, how I treat the symbol of my monarchy," he cried with a terrible laugh. "I shall soon demonstrate to you what a p.r.i.c.ked balloon is this Kingship of which you prate. I believe that you, my own father, are ready to supplant me, I know that Julius, my cousin, is straining every nerve to procure my downfall; but you shall learn how a man who despises the pinchbeck honors of a throne can defeat your petty malice and miserable scheming. Monsieur Nesimir, I proclaim Kosnovia a Republic from this hour! Here and now I abdicate!
Summon a meeting of the a.s.sembly to-morrow, and I shall give its members the best of reasons why the State will prosper more under the people"s rule than under that of either of the men who are so anxious to succeed me."
"Abdicate! Republic! What monstrous folly!" cried Prince Michael, his plethoric face convulsed with anger at this unexpected counterstroke.
"I am saying that which, with G.o.d"s help, I shall perform!" cried Alec, despair falling from him like a discarded garment as he realized what his project would mean to Joan and himself.
"You may abdicate, of course, if you choose," came the scornful retort; "but you have no power to break the Delgrado line."
"My power will be put to the test to-morrow," said Alec. "I am not afraid to measure my strength against the pitiful cowards who struck at me through a woman"s love."
"Pay no heed to him, Monsieur Nesimir!" piped Prince Michael, whose voice rose to a thin falsetto. "He is beside himself. If he chooses to vacate the throne, it reverts to me."
"A Republic in Kosnovia!" snarled Stampoff. "That, indeed, will mark the beginning of the end for the Slav race. A single year would wipe us out of existence. What say you, Beliani, and you, Marulitch? Why are you dumb? Was it for this that we have striven through so many years? Shall our country be wrecked now because a hot headed youth puts his vows to a woman before every consideration of national welfare?"
"The notion is preposterous!" growled Julius, gaining courage from Stampoff"s bold denunciation; but Beliani tried to temporize.
"We are far too excited to deal with this vexed affair to-night," he said. "The King is naturally aggrieved by a trying experience, and is hardly in a fit state of mind to consider the grave issues raised by his words. Let us forget what we have just heard. To-morrow we shall all be calmer and saner."
"Monsieur Nesimir," said Alec sternly, fixing the hapless President with his masterful eye, "while I remain King you must obey my orders. See to it that notices are despatched to-night to the members of the National a.s.sembly summoning a special meeting for an early hour to-morrow."
"Monsieur Nesimir will do nothing of the kind!" shrieked the infuriated Prince Michael. "I forbid it!"
"And I command it," cried Alec. "If he refuses, I shall take other steps to insure my wishes being fulfilled."
"Then I will tell you why your Joan has gone!" bellowed the Prince. "No, Marie, I will not be restrained!" he shouted to his wife, who had rushed to him in a very frenzy of alarm. She clutched at his shoulder; but he shook himself free brutally.
"It is full time you knew what I have done for you," he hissed venomously at Alec. "Stampoff and your mother and I, alone of those in this room, are aware of the fraud that has been perpetrated on the people of this country. You are not King of Kosnovia. You are not my son. Your father was a Colorado gold miner to whom your mother was married before I met her, and who died before you were born. For the sake of his widow"s money I gave her my name, and was fool enough to fall in with her whim of pride that you should be brought up as a Prince Delgrado. I suppose Stampoff urged your mother to reveal the facts to that chit of a girl who has addled your brain, and she, fortunately, had sense enough to see that you can not continue to occupy the throne five seconds after it becomes known that you are a mere alien, that your name is Alexander Talbot, and that I, Michael Delgrado, who married a foreigner in order that I might live, and permitted an American child to be reared as a lawful Prince of my house, am the lawful King."
The little man strutted up and down the room in a fume of indignation, and evidently felt fully justified in his own esteem. Ever selfish and vain, he fancied that he had been the victim of a cruel fate, and he read the sheer bewilderment in Alec"s face as a tribute to the master stroke he had just delivered.
But his self conceit wilted under the contemptuous scorn of his wife"s gaze, which he chanced to meet when his posturing ceased.
Alec looked to his mother for some confirmation or denial of the astounding statement blurted forth by her husband. But she had no eyes for her son then. The wrongs and sufferings of a lifetime were welling up from her heart to her lips. The agonized suspense of the last few minutes had given way to the frenzy of a woman outraged in her deepest sentiments.
She relinquished the chair to which she had been clinging, and faced the diminutive Prince with a quiet dignity that overawed him.
"So that is how you keep your oath, Michael!" she said. "When I forgave your infidelities, when I pandered to your extravagance, when I allowed you to fritter away the wealth bequeathed to me by a man whose fine nature was so far removed from yours that I have often wondered why G.o.d created two such opposite types of humanity, time and again you vowed that the idle folly of my youth would never be revealed by you. Twice you swore it on your knees when I was stung beyond endurance by your baseness. No, Michael," and her voice rose almost to a scream when her husband tried to silence her with a curse, "you shall hear the truth now, if I have to ask my son as a last favor to his unhappy mother to still that foul tongue of yours by force!"
For an instant, she made a wild appeal to Alec. "Your father was an honorable man," she cried. "For his sake, if not for mine, since I have forfeited all claim to your love, compel this man to be silent!"
The belief was slowly establishing itself in her son"s mind that the incredible thing he was hearing was actually true. Nevertheless, he was temporarily bereft of the poise and balance of judgment that might have enabled him to adjust the warring elements in his bewildered brain. It was a new and horrible experience to be asked by his mother to use physical violence against the man he had been taught to regard as his father.
He had never respected Michael Delgrado,--he could acknowledge that now without the twinge of conscience that had always accompanied the unpleasing thought in the past,--yet, despite the gulf already yawning wide between them, his soul revolted against the notion of laying a hand on him in anger.
But he did stoop over the spluttering little Prince and said sternly, "You must not interrupt my mother again! You must not, I tell you!"
Such was the chilling emphasis of his words that Delgrado"s loud objurgations died away in his throat, and the distraught Princess, with one last look of unutterable contempt at her royal spouse, faced the other occupants of the room.
"I did harm to none by my innocent deception," she pleaded. "I was very young when I married Alec"s father, who was nearly twenty years older than I. We were not rich, and we were compelled to live in a rude mining camp, where my husband owned some claims that seemed to be of little value. But from the day of our wedding our fortunes began to improve, and, in the year before my son was born, money poured in on us. That small collection of wooden shanties has now become a great city. The land my husband owned is worth ten thousand times its original value; but, unfortunately, when wealth came, I grew dissatisfied with my surroundings. I wanted to travel, to mix in society, to become one of the fashionable throng that flocks to Paris and London and the Riviera in their seasons. My husband refused to desert the State in which his interests were bound up.
"We quarreled--it was all my fault--and then one day he was killed in a mine accident, and I, scarce knowing what I was doing, fled to New York for distraction from my grief and self condemnation. My son was born there, and in that same year I met Prince Michael Delgrado in a friend"s house. To me in those days a Prince was a wonderful creature. He quickly saw that I was a prize worth capturing, and not many months elapsed before we were married. I had all the foolish vanity of a young woman, unused to the world, who was ent.i.tled to call herself a Princess, and it seemed to my flighty mind that the fact of my son bearing a different name to my own would always advertise my plebeian origin; for I was quite a woman of the people, the daughter of a storekeeper in Pueblo. I cast aside my old and tried acquaintances, placed my affairs in trustworthy hands, and, when we set up an establishment in Paris, my infant son came to be known as a Prince of the Delgrado family.
"Once such a blunder is made it is not easily rectified; but during many a sad hour have I regretted it, for Michael Delgrado did not scruple to use it as a threat whenever I resented his ill conduct. At first a trivial thing, in time it became a millstone round my neck. As Alec grew up, it became more and more difficult to announce that he was not Prince Alexis Delgrado, but a simple commoner, Alexander Talbot by name.
"There, then, you have the measure of my transgression. It was the knowledge of the truth that drove that dear girl, Joan Vernon, from Delgratz this evening, because General Stampoff would not scruple to reveal the imposture if he failed to secure the King"s adherence to his projects."
"G.o.d"s bones!" broke in Stampoff. "I made him King, though I was aware from the day of your wedding that he was not Michael"s son. King he is, and King he will remain if he agrees to my terms."
"Go on with your story, mother," said Alec softly. "I think I am beginning to understand now."
"What more need I say?" wailed the Princess in a sudden access of grief.
"I have squandered your love, Alec, I have ruined my own life, I have devoted all these wretched years to a man who is the worst sort of blackmailer,--a husband who trades on his wife"s weakness."
She turned on Prince Michael with a last cry. "I am done with you now forever!" she sobbed. "I have borne with you for my son"s sake; but now you and I must dwell apart, for my very soul loathes you!"
She sank into a chair in a pa.s.sion of tears, and Alec bent over her. He spoke no word to her; but his hand rested gently around her neck while his eyes traveled from Michael"s gray-green face to Julius Marulitch"s white one.
"I think we have all heard sufficient of the Delgrado history to render unnecessary any further comment on my decision to relinquish an honor that, it would appear, I had no right to accept," he said. "I have gained my end, though by a strange path. Will you please leave me with my mother?"
The one man present who felt completely out of his depth in this sea of discord took it upon himself to cry pathetically:
"The door is locked, your--your Majesty!"
"Ah, forgive me, Monsieur Nesimir," said Alec, with a friendly smile. "I had forgotten that. And, now that I come to think of it, I still have something to say; but we need not detain my mother to hear an uninteresting conversation. Pardon me one moment, while I attend to her."
CHAPTER XIV
THE BROKEN TREATY
Alec unlocked the door. The laconic Bosko returned his all sufficing "_Oui, monsieur_," to the request that he would bring Mademoiselle Joan"s French maid to Princess Delgrado, since it was in Alec"s mind that Pauline might be discreet.
Prince Michael, Beliani, Marulitch, and Nesimir had already formed themselves into a whispering group. Stampoff was seated apart, morose and thoughtful. The old man"s elbows rested on his knees and his chin was propped between his bony fists. Princess Delgrado had flung herself forward on the table. Her face was hidden by her outstretched arms. This att.i.tude of abandonment, the clenched hands, the convulsive heaving of her shoulders, were eloquent of tempest tossed emotions. She looked so forlorn that her son was tempted to return to her side without delay; but instead he walked quietly toward the four men cl.u.s.tered in the center of the room. They started apart and faced him nervously. It seemed that even yet they feared lest some uncontrolled gust of anger might lead Alec to fling himself blindly upon them. Had they but known it, he despised them too greatly to think of mauling them.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I have one small request to make. Give me your word of honor--I will take it for what it is worth--that to-night"s happenings shall remain unknown to the outer world, and that there will be no interference with my mother or myself before we leave Delgratz."
Prince Michael, who had recovered some of his jauntiness, looked at Alec with the crafty eye of a cowed hyena; but he said coolly, "There is nothing to be gained by publishing our blunders to all the world."
"Have I your promise?" insisted Alec.
"Yes."
"And yours?" he said to Marulitch.
"Of course I agree," came the ready answer. "I, like Prince Michael, feel that it would be folly----"