The Great Prince Shan, E. Phillips Oppenheim [positive books to read TXT] 📗

single-eyed Labour, and down goes England, crumbling into the dust!—Let us lunch, my friends. The cuisine is still good here."

Nigel excused himself.

"I am engaged," he said. "We may meet afterwards."

"Something tells me, my dear Nigel," Karschoff declared, "that you are bent on frivolity."

"If to lunch with a woman is frivolous, I plead guilty," Nigel replied.

Karschoff's face was suddenly grave. He seemed on the point of saying something but checked himself and turned away with a little shrug of the shoulders.

"Each one to his taste," he murmured. "For my aperitif, a dash of absinthe in my cocktail; for Dorminster here, the lure of a woman's smile. Perhaps he gains. Who knows?"

CHAPTER XVIII

Nigel waited for his luncheon companion in the crowded vestibule of London's most famous club restaurant. He was to a certain extent out of the picture among the crowd of this new generation of pleasure seekers, on the faces of whom opulence and acquisitiveness had already laid its branding hand. The Mecca alike of musical comedy and the Stock Exchange, the place, however, still preserved a curious attraction for the foreign element in London, so that when at last Naida appeared, she was exchanging courtesies with an Italian Duchess on one side and a celebrated Russian dancer on the other. Nigel led her at once to the table which he had selected in the balcony.

"I have obeyed your wishes to the letter," he said, "and I think that you are right. Up here we are entirely alone, and, as you see, they have had the sense to place the tables a long way apart. Am I to blame, I wonder, for asking you to do so unconventional a thing as to lunch here again alone with me?"

She drew off her gloves and smiled across the table at him. Her plain, tailor-made gown, with its high collar, was the last word in elegance. The simplicity of her French hat was to prove the despair of a well-known modiste seated downstairs, who made a sketch of it on the menu and tried in vain to copy it. Even to Nigel's exacting taste she was flawless.

"Is it unconventional?" she asked carelessly. "I do not study those things. I lunch or dine with a party, generally, because it happens so. I lunch alone with you because it pleases me."

"And for this material side of our entertainment?" he enquired, smiling, as he handed her the menu card.

"A grapefruit, a quail with white grapes, and some asparagus," she replied promptly. "You see, in one respect I am an easy companion. I know exactly what I want. A mixed vermouth, if you like, yes. And now, tell me your news?"

"There is news," he announced, "which the whole world will know of before many hours are past. France has broken her pact with England."

"It is my opinion," she said deliberately, "that France has been very patient with you."

"And mine," he acknowledged. "We have now to see what will become of a fat and prosperous country with a semi-obsolete fleet and a comic opera army."

"Must we talk of serious things?" she asked softly. "I am weary of the clanking wheels of life."

He sighed.

"And yet for you," he said, "they are not grinding out the fate of your country."

"Nevertheless, I too hear them all the time," she rejoined. "And I hate them. They make one lose one's sense of proportion. After all, it is our own individual and internal life which counts. I can understand Nero fiddling while Rome burned, if he really had no power to call up fire engines."

"Are you an individualist?" he asked.

"Not fundamentally," she replied, "but I am caught up in the throes of a great reaction. I have been studying events, which it is quite true may change the destinies of the world, so intently that I have almost forgotten that, after all, the greatest thing in the world, my world, is the happiness or ill-content of Naida Karetsky. It is really of more importance to me to-day that my quail should be cooked as I like it than that England has let go her last rope."

"You are not an Englishwoman," he reminded her.

"That is of minor importance. We are all so much immersed in great affairs just now that we forget it is the small ones that count. I want my luncheon to be perfect, I want you to seem as nice to me as I have fancied you, and I want you to chase completely away the idea that you are cultivating my acquaintance for interested motives."

"That I can assure you from the bottom of my heart is not the case," he replied. "Whatever other interests I may feel in you," he added, after a moment's hesitation, "my first and foremost is a personal one."

She looked at him with gratitude in her eyes for his understanding.

"A woman in my position," she complained, "is out of place. A man ought to come over and study your deservings or your undeservings and pore over the problem of the future of Europe. I am a woman, and I am not big enough. I am too physical. I have forgotten how to enjoy myself, and I love pleasure. Now am I a revelation to you?"

"You have always been that," he told her. "You are so truthful yourself," he went on boldly, "that I shall run the risk of saying the most banal thing in the world, just because it happens to be the truth. I have felt for you since our first meeting what I have felt for no other woman in the world."

"I like that, and I am glad you said it," she declared lightly enough, although her lips quivered for a moment. "And they have put exactly the right quantity of Maraschino in my grapefruit. I feel that I am on the way to happiness. I am going to enjoy my luncheon.—Tell me about Maggie."

"I saw her yesterday," he answered. "We have arranged for her to come and live at Belgrave Square, after all."

"My terrible altruism once more," she sighed. "I had meant not to speak another serious word, and yet I must. Maggie is very clever, amazingly clever, I sometimes think, but if she had the brains of all of her sex rolled into one, she would still be facing now an impossible situation."

"Just what do you mean?" he asked cautiously.

"Maggie seems determined to measure her wits with those of Prince Shan," she said. "Believe me, that is hopeless."

She looked up at him and laughed softly.

"Oh, my dear friend," she went on, "that wooden expression is wonderful. You do not quite know where I stand, except—may I flatter myself?—as regards your personal feelings for me. Am I for Immelan and his schemes, or for your own foolish country? You do not know, so you make for yourself a face of wood."

"Where do you stand?" he asked bluntly.

"Sufficiently devoted to your interests to beg you this," she replied. "Do not let your little cousin think that she can deal with a man like Prince Shan. There can be only one end to that."

Nigel moved a little uneasily in his place.

"Prince Shan is only an ordinary human being, after all," he protested.

"That is just where you are mistaken," she declared. "Prince Shan is one of the most extraordinary human beings who ever lived. He is one of the most farseeing men in the world, and he is absolutely the most powerful."

"But China," Nigel began—

"His power extends far beyond China," she interrupted, "and there is no brain in the world to match his to-day."

"If he were a god wielding thunderbolts," Nigel observed, "he could scarcely do much harm to Maggie here in London."

"There was an artist once," she said reflectively, "who drew a caricature of Prince Shan and sent it to the principal comic paper in America. It was such a success that a little time later on he followed it up with another, which included a line of Prince Shan's ancestors. Within a month's time the artist was found murdered. Prince Shan was in China at the time."

"Are you suggesting that the artist was murdered through Prince Shan's contrivance?"

"Am I a fool?" she answered. "Do you not know that to speak disrespectfully of the ancestors of a Chinaman is unforgivable? To all appearances Prince Shan never moved from his wonderful palace in Pekin, many thousands of miles away. Yet he lifted his little finger and the man died."

"Isn't this a little melodramatic?" Nigel murmured.

"Melodrama is often nearer the truth than people think," she said. "Shall I give you another instance? I know of several."

"One more, then."

"Prince Shan was in Paris two years ago, incognito," she continued. "There was at the time a small but very fashionable restaurant in the Bois, close to the Pré Catelan. He presented himself one night there for dinner, accompanied, I believe, by La Belle Nita, the Chinese dancer who is in London to-day. As you know, there is little in Prince Shan's appearance to denote the Oriental, but for some reason or other the proprietor refused him a table. Prince Shan made no scene. He left and went elsewhere. Three nights later, the café was burnt to the ground, and the proprietor was ruined."

"Anything else?" Nigel asked.

"Only one thing more," she replied. "I have known him slightly for years. In Asia he ranks to all men as little less than a god. His palaces are filled with priceless treasures. He has the finest collection of jewels in the world. His wealth is simply inexhaustible. His appearance you appreciate. Yet I have never seen him look at a woman as he looked at your cousin the first time he met her. I was at the Ritz with my father, and I watched. I know you think that I am being foolish. I am not. I am a person with a very great deal of common sense, and I tell you that Prince Shan has never desired a thing in life to which he has not helped himself. Maggie is a clever child, but she cannot toss knives with a conjuror."

Nigel was impressed and a little worried.

"It seems absurd to think that anything could happen to Maggie here in London," he said, "after—"

He paused abruptly. Naida smiled at him.

"After her escape from Germany, I suppose you were going to say? You see, I know all about it. There was no Prince Shan in Berlin."

He shrugged his shoulders slightly.

"Well," he admitted, "I don't quite bring myself to believe in your terrible ogre, so I shall not worry. Tell me what news you have from Russia?"

"Political?"

"Any news."

She smiled.

"I notice," she said, "that English people are changing their attitude towards my country. A few years ago she seemed negligible to them. Now they are beginning to have—shall I call them fears? Even my kind host, I think, would like to know what is in Paul Matinsky's heart as he hears the friends of Oscar Immelan plead their cause."

"I admit it," he told her frankly. "I will go farther. I would give a great deal to know what is in your own mind to-day concerning us and our destiny. But these things are not for the moment. It was not to discuss or even to think of them that I asked you here to-day."

"Why did you invite me, then?" she asked, smiling.

"Because I wanted the pleasure of having you opposite me," he replied,—"because I wanted to know you better."

"And are you progressing?"

"Indifferently well," he acknowledged. "I seem to gain a little and slide back again. You are not an easy person to know well."

"Nothing that is worth having is easy," she answered, "and I can assure you, when my friendship is once gained, it is a rare and steadfast thing."

"And your affection?" he ventured.

Her eyes rested upon his for a moment and then suddenly drooped. A little tinge of colour stole into her cheeks. For a moment she seemed to have lost her admirable poise.

"That is not easily disturbed," she told him quietly. "I