A Son of the Immortals, Louis Tracy [mobi ebook reader txt] 📗

already advised her to yield.

"If I even knew his relatives," she faltered. "His parents live in Paris. We have never met. How can I say to his mother, 'Your son wants me to marry him. What do you think of me?' She, a Princess, would scoff at the idea."

"Alec is well aware of that; hence he has written direct to you, and said nothing to any other person. Let me assure you that if Prince Michael Delgrado had gone to Delgratz he would have died a sudden and violent death. Prince Michael knew it, and declined the distinction. Believe me, too, Alec has the very best of reasons for consulting no one in his choice of a wife. Now, Joan, be brave! When all is said and done, it should be far more pleasant to marry a King than fling a bomb at him, and I have met several young ladies almost as pretty as you who were ready enough to adopt the latter alternative. At any rate you will take no harm by crossing the Danube. It is not the Rubicon, you know, and you have Saint Peter to lean on in case of difficulty."

So Felix did not return to Paris alone, and when he met Count Julius Marulitch next morning in the Louvre he was able to announce that Miss Joan Vernon had accepted the commission to copy the Delgratz Saint Peter and was ready to start for Kosnovia by the night mail.

CHAPTER VI JOAN GOES INTO SOCIETY

Joan did not telegraph to Alec. She destroyed each of half a dozen attempts, and ended by taking refuge in silence. It was impossible to say what she had to say in the bald language of a telegram. Merely to announce her departure from Paris would put her in the false position of having accepted Alec's proposal apparently without reserve, which was exactly what she meant not to do, and any other explanation of the journey would bewilder him.

Her friend Léontine, housemaid at the Chope de la Sorbonne, did not fail to tell her of Alec's call the day she left Paris for Barbizon. There was no mistaking Léontine's description, which was impressionist to a degree. It was evident, then, that he not only possessed her address, as shown by the letter, but knew of her absence. So she reasoned that if he did not hear from her within forty-eight hours he would assume that she was still away from home. By that time she would be in Delgratz, and, although she felt some uneasiness at the prospect, she was brave enough not to shirk meeting him.

They were not children that they should be afraid of speaking their thoughts, nor lovesick romanticists, apt to be swayed wholly by sentiment, and she could trust Alec to see the folly of rushing into a union that might imperil his career. In the depths of her heart she confessed herself proud and happy at the prospect of becoming his wife; but she would never consent to a marriage that was not commended by prudence. Better, far better, they should part forever than that the lapse of a few months should prove how irretrievably she had ruined him.

This might be sound commonsense, but it was not love, yet all this, and more, Joan said to Felix Poluski, and the little man had nodded his head with grins of approval. Meanwhile, he sang and was busy.

Count Julius, posted now in the Pole's mottled history, had demanded absolute anonymity before he carried the negotiations for the picture any further. Felix gave the pledge readily, since Joan could not be in Delgratz a day ere she suspected the truth. At any rate, Marulitch was satisfied; he introduced Felix to a well-known dealer in the Rue St. Honoré, and thenceforth disappeared from the transaction. Joan herself entered into the necessary business arrangements, about which there was nothing hidden or contraband. The terms proposed were liberal, considering her poor status in the art world; but they were quite straightforward. She was given return tickets to Delgratz for herself and her maid; Felix was similarly provided for; five hundred dollars was paid in advance, and a written guaranty was handed to her that a similar sum, together with hotel expenses, would be forthcoming in exchange for a copy of the Byzantine Saint Peter.

Of course, reviewing matters calmly in the train, she hardly expected that the second portion of the contract would be fulfilled. She knew quite well that the conspirators hoped to turn her presence in the Kosnovian capital to their own account, and when their scheme was balked they would devise some means of wriggling out of the bargain. But she laughed at the notion that she, an unknown student, should have suddenly become a pawn in the game of empire. There was an element of daring, almost of peril, in the adventure that fascinated her. It savored of those outlandish incidents recorded in novels of a sensational type, wherein fur coated, sallow faced, cigarette smoking scoundrels plotted the destruction of dynasties, and used fair maidens as decoys for susceptible Kings. Certainly, Felix Poluski, judged by his past, was no bad prototype of a character in that class of fiction; regarded in his present guise, as he sat opposite her in the dining car of the Orient Express, he looked the most harmless desperado that ever preyed on a quivering world.

His face seemed to be smaller and more wrinkled than usual. From Joan's superior height his hump was accentuated till it showed above the top of his head, and the girl was conscious, though she resolutely closed her eyes to the fact, that the admiring glances with which she was favored by some of her fellow passengers were somewhat modified by the humorous incongruity of Poluski's appearance.

At first, they tacitly avoided any reference to Alec or Delgratz. Their talk dealt with art and artists, and Joan had a good deal to say about the delights of painting in the open air.

Felix blinked at her sagely. "Behold, then, the beginning of the end!" he cackled.

"The end of what?" she asked, with some kindling of suspicion, since her queer little friend's tricks of conversation were not new to her.

"Of your career as an artist. Barbizon is fatal to true emotion. It induces a fine sense of the beauty of sunsets, of diffused light in sylvan solitudes, of blues that are greens and browns that are reds. In a word, the study of nature inclines one toward truth, whereas art is essentially a gracious lie. That is why the Greeks were the greatest artists: because they were most pleasing liars. They understood the crassness of humanity. Long before Browning wrote Fra Lippo Lippi they realized that