It was all well enough for me to say—as I had to to Tillie many a time—that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what, after all, was an accident of birth. It was well enough for me to say that it was only by chance that I wasn't strutting about with a crown on my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.
Nevertheless, at five o'clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.
They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take myself in hand.
"Now look here, Minnie, you idiot," I said to myself, "this is America; you're as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck. And if he calls you 'my good girl' hit him."
They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I hadn't caught the back of a chair, I'd have had one foot back of the other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.
"We're late, Minnie!" Miss Patty said. "Oskar, this is one of my best friends, and you are to be very nice to her."
He had one of those single glass things in his eye and he gave me a good stare through it. Seen close he was handsomer than Mr. Pierce, but he looked older than his picture.
"Ask her if she won't be nice to me," he said in as good English as mine, and held out his hand.
"Any of Miss Patty's friends—" I began, with a lump in my throat, and gave his hand a good squeeze. I thought he looked startled, and suddenly I had a sort of chill.
"Good gracious!" I exclaimed, "should I have kissed it?"
They roared at that, and Miss Patty had to sit down in a chair.
"You see, she knows, Oskar," she said. "The rest are thinking and perhaps guessing, but Minnie is the only one that knows, and she never talks. Everybody who comes here tells Minnie his troubles."
"But—am I a trouble?" he asked in a low tone. I was down in the spring, but I heard it.
"So far you have hardly been an unalloyed joy," she replied, and from the spring I echoed "Amen."
"Yes—I'm so hung with family skeletons that I clatter when I walk," I explained, pretending I hadn't heard, and brought them both glasses of water. "It's got to be a habit with some people to save their sciatica and their husband's dispositions and their torpid livers and their unpaid bills and bring 'em here to me."
He sniffed at the glass and put it down.
"Herr Gott!" he said, "what a water! It is—the whole thing is extraordinary! I can understand the reason for Carlsbad or Wiesbaden—it is gay. One sees one's friends; it is—social. But here—!"
He got up and, lifting a window curtain, peered out into the snow.
"Here," he repeated, "shut in by forests and hills, a thousand miles from life—" He shrugged his shoulders and came back to the table. "It is well enough for the father," he went on to Miss Patty, "but for you! Why—it is depressing, gray. The only bit of color in it all is—here, in what you call the spring-house." I thought he meant Miss Patty's cheeks or her lovely violet eyes, but he was looking at my hair. I had caught his eye on it before, but this time he made no secret about it, and he sighed, for all the world as if it reminded him of something. He went over to the slot-machine and stood in front of it, humming and trying the different combinations. I must say he had a nice back.
Miss Patty came over and slipped her hand in mine.
"Well?" she whispered, looking at me with her pretty eyebrows raised.
"He looks all right," I had to confess. "Perhaps you can coax him to shave."
She laughed.
"Oskar!" she called, "you have passed, but you are conditioned. Minnie objects to the mustache."
He turned and looked at me gravely.
"It is my—greatest attraction," he declared, "but it is also a great care. If Miss Minnie demands it, I shall give it to her in a—in a little box." He sauntered over and looked at me in his audacious way. "But you must promise to care for it. Many women have loved it."
"I believe that!" I answered, and stared back at him without blinking. "I guess I wouldn't want the responsibility."
But I had an idea that he meant what he said about the many women, and that Miss Patty knew it as well as I did. She flushed a little, and they went very soon after that. I stood and watched them until they disappeared in the snow, and I felt lonelier than ever, and sad, although certainly he was better than I had expected to find him. He was a man, and not a little cub with a body hardly big enough to carry his forefathers' weaknesses. But he had a cold eye and a warm mouth, and that sort of man is generally a social success and a matrimonial failure.
It wasn't until toward night that I remembered I'd been talking to a real prince and I hadn't once said "your Highness" or "your Excellency" or whatever I should have said. I had said "You!"
I had hardly closed the door after them when it opened again and Mr. Pierce came in. He shut the door and, going over to one of the tables, put a package down on it.
"Here's the stuff you wanted for the spring, Minnie," he announced. "I suppose I can't do anything more than register a protest against it?"
"You needn't bother doing that," I answered, "unless it makes you feel better. Your authority ends at that door. Inside the spring-house I'm in control."
(It's hard to believe, with things as they are, that I once really believed that. But I did. It was three full days later that I learned that I'd been mistaken!)
Well, he sat there and looked at nothing while I heated water in my brass kettle over the fire and dissolved the things against Thoburn's quick eye the next day, and he didn't say anything. He had a gift for keeping quiet, Mr. Pierce had. It got on my nerves after a while.
"Things are doing better," I remarked, stirring up my mixture.
"Yes," he said, without moving.
"I suppose they're happier now they have a doctor?"
"Yes—no—I don't know. He's not much of a doctor, you know—and there don't seem to be any medical books around."
"There's one on the care and feeding of infants in the circulating library," I said, "and he can have my Anatomy."
"You're generous!" he remarked, with one of his quick smiles.
"It's a book," I snapped, and fell to stirring again. But he was moping once more, with his feet out and his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.
"I say, Minnie—"
"Yes?"
"Miss—Miss Jennings and the von Inwald were here just now, weren't they? I passed them on the bridge."
"Yes."
"What—how do you like him?"
"Better than I expected and not so well as I might," I said. "If you are going to the house soon you might take Miss Patty her handkerchief. It's there under that table."
I took my mixture into the pantry and left it to cool. But as I started back I stopped. He had got the handkerchief and was standing in front of the fire, holding it in the palm of his hand and looking at it. And all in a minute he crushed it to his face with both hands and against the firelight I could see him quivering.
I stepped back into the pantry and came out again noisily. He was standing very calm and quiet where he had been before, and no handkerchief in sight.
"Well," I said, "did you get it?"
"Get what?"
"Miss Patty's handkerchief?"
"Oh—that! Yes. Here it is." He pulled it out of his pocket and held it up by the corner.
"Ridiculous size, isn't it, and—" he held it up to his nose—"I dare say one could almost tell it was hers by the scent. It's—it's like her."
"Humph!" I said, suddenly suspicious, and looked at it. "Well," I said, "it may remind you of Miss Patty, and the scent may be like Miss Patty, but she doesn't use perfume on her handkerchief. This has an E. C. on it, which means Eliza Cobb."
He left soon after, rather crestfallen, but to save my life I couldn't forget what I'd seen—him with that scrap of linen that he thought was hers crushed to his face, and his shoulders heaving. I had an idea that he hadn't cared much for women before, and that, this being a first attack, he hadn't established what the old doctor used to call an immunity.
Mrs. Hutchins came out to the spring-house the next morning. She was dressed in a black silk with real lace collar and cuffs, and she was so puffed up with pride that she forgot to be nasty to me.
"I thought I'd better come to you, Minnie," she said. "There seems to be nobody in authority here any more. Mr. Carter has put the—has put Mr. von Inwald in the north wing. I can not imagine why he should have given him the coldest and most disagreeable part of the house."
I said I'd speak to Mr. Carter and try to have him moved, and she rustled over to where I was brushing the hearth and stooped down.
"Mr. von Inwald is incognito, of course," she said, "but he belongs to a very old family in his own country—a noble family. He ought to have the best there is in the house."
I promised that, too, and she went away, but I made up my mind to talk to Mr. Pierce. The sanatorium business isn't one where you can put your own likes and dislikes against the comfort of the guests.
Miss Cobb came out a few minutes after; she had on her new green silk with the white lace trimming. She saw me staring as she threw off her cape and put her curler on the log.
"It's a little dressy for so early, of course, Minnie," she said, "but I wish you'd see some of the other women! Breakfast looked like an afternoon reception. What would you think of pinning this black velvet ribbon around my head?"
"It might have done twenty years ago, Miss Cobb," I answered, "but I wouldn't advise it now." I was working at the slot-machine, and I heard her sniff behind me as she hung up her mirror on the window-frame.
She tried the curler on the curtain, which she knows I object to, but she was too full of her subject to be sulky for long.
"I wish you could see Blanche Moody!" she began again, standing holding the curler, with a thin wreath of smoke making a halo over her head. "Drawn in—my dear, I don't see how she can breathe! I guess there's no doubt about Mr. von Inwald."
"I'd like to know who put this beer check in the slot-machine yesterday," I said as indifferently as I could. "What about Mr. von Inwald?"
She tiptoed over to me, the halo trailing after her.
"About his being a messenger from the prince to Miss Jennings!" she answered in a whisper. "He spent last night closeted with papa, and the chambermaid on that floor told Lily Biggs that there was almost a quarrel."
"That doesn't mean anything," I objected. "If the Angel Gabriel was shut in with Mr. Jennings for ten minutes he'd be blowing his trumpet for help."
Miss Cobb shrugged her shoulders and took hold of a fresh wisp of hair with the curler.
"I dare say," she assented, "but the Angel Gabriel wouldn't have waited to breakfast with Miss Jennings, and have kissed her hand before everybody at the foot of the stairs!"
"Is he handsome?" I asked, curious to know how he would impress other women. But Miss Cobb had never seen a man she would call ugly.
"Handsome!" she said. "My dear, he's beautiful! He has a duel scar on his left cheek—all the nobility have them over there. I've a cousin living in Berlin—she's the wittiest person—and she says the German child of the future will be born with a scarred left cheek!"
Well, I was sick enough of hearing of Mr. von Inwald before the day was over. All morning in the spring-house they talked Mr. von Inwald. They pretended to play cards, but they were really playing European royalty. Every time somebody laid down a queen, he'd say, "Is the queen still living, or didn't she die a few years ago?" And when they played the knave, they'd start off about the prince again. They'd all decided that Mr. von Inwald was noble—somebody said that the "von" was a sort of title. The women were planning to make the evenings more cheerful, too. They couldn't have a dance with the men using canes or forbidden to exercise, but Miss Cobb had a lot of what she called "parlor games" that she wanted to try out. "Introducing the Jones family" was one of them.
In the afternoon Mr. von Inwald came out to the spring-house and sat around, very affable and friendly, drinking the water. He and the bishop grew quite chummy. Miss Patty was not there, but about four o'clock Mr. Pierce came out. He did not sit down, but wandered around the room, not talking to anybody, but staring, whenever he could, at the prince. Once I caught Mr. von Inwald's eyes fixed on him, as if he might have seen him before. After a while Mr. Pierce sat down in a corner like a sulky child and filled his pipe, and as nobody noticed him except to complain about the pipe, which he didn't even hear, he sat there for a half-hour, bent forward, with his pipe clenched in his teeth, and never took his eyes off Mr. von Inwald's face.
Senator Biggs was the one who really caused the trouble. He spent a good deal of time in the spring-house trying to fool his stomach by keeping it filled up all the time with water. He had got past the cranky stage, being too weak for it; his face was folded up in wrinkles like an accordion and his double chin was so flabby you could have tucked it away inside his collar.
"What do you think of American women, Mr. von Inwald?" he asked, and everybody stopped playing cards and listened for the answer. As Mr. von Inwald represented the prince, wouldn't he be likely to voice the prince's opinion of American women?
It's my belief Mr. von Inwald was going to say something nice. He smiled as if he meant to, but just then he saw Mr. Pierce in his corner sneering behind his pipe. They looked at each other steadily, and nobody could mistake the hate in Mr. Pierce's face or his sneer. After a minute the prince looked away and shrugged his shoulders, but he didn't make his pretty speech.
"American women!" he said, turning his glass of spring water around on the table before him, "they are very lovely, of course." He looked around and there were Mrs. Moody and Mrs. Biggs and Miss Cobb, and he even glanced at me in the spring. Then he looked again at Mr. Pierce and kept his eyes there. "But they are spoiled, fearfully spoiled. They rule their parents and they expect to rule their husbands. In Europe we do things better; we are not—what is the English?—hag-ridden?"
There was a sort of murmur among the men, but the women all nodded as if they thought Europe was entirely right. They'd have agreed with him if he'd advocated sixteen wives sitting cross-legged on a mat, like the Turks. Mr. Pierce was still staring at the prince.
"What I don't quite understand, Mr. von Inwald," the bishop put in in his nice way, "is your custom of expecting a girl to bring her husband a certain definite sum of money and to place it under the husband's control. Our wealthy American girls control their own money," He was thinking of Miss Patty, and everybody knew it.
The prince turned red and glared at the bishop. Then I think he remembered that they didn't know who he was, and he smiled and started to turning the glass again.
"Pardon!" he said. "Is it not better? What do women know of money? They throw it away on trifles, dress, jewels—American women are extravagant. It is one result of their—of their spoiling."
Mr. Pierce got up and emptied his pipe into the fire. Then he turned.
"I'm afraid you have not known the best type of American women," he said, looking hard at the prince. "Our representative women are our middle-class women. They do not contract European alliances, not having sufficient money to attract the attention of the nobility, or enough to buy titles, as they do pearls, for the purpose of adornment."
Mr. von Inwald got up, and his face was red. Mr. Pierce was white and sneering.
"Also," he went on, "when they marry they wish to control their own money, and not see it spent in—ways with which you are doubtless familiar."
We were all paralyzed. Nobody moved. Mr. Pierce put his pipe in his pocket and stalked out, slamming the door. Then Mr. von Inwald shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
"I see I shall have to talk to our young friend," he said and picked up his glass. "I'm afraid I've given a wrong impression. I like the American women very much; too well," he went on with a flash of his teeth, looking around the room, and brought the glass to the spring for me to fill. But as I've said before, I can tell a good bit about a man from the way he gives me his glass, and he was in a perfect frenzy of rage. When I reached it back to him he gripped it until his nails were white.
My joint ached all the rest of the afternoon. About five o'clock Mr. Thoburn stopped in long enough to say: "What's this I hear about Carter making an ass of himself to-day?"
"I haven't heard it," I answered. "What is it?"
But he only laughed and turned up his collar to go.
"Jove, Minnie," he said, "why do women of your spirit always champion the losing side? Be a good girl; give me a hand now and then with this thing, and I'll see you don't lose by it."
"We're not going to lose," I retorted angrily. "Nobody has left yet. We are still ahead on the books."
He came over and shook a finger in my face.
"Nobody has left—and why? Because they're all taking a series of baths. Wait until they've had their fifteen, or twenty-one, or whatever the cure is, and then see them run!"
It was true enough; I knew it.
Tillie brought the supper basket for the shelter-house about six o'clock and sat down for a minute by the fire. She said Mr. Pierce (Carter to her) had started out with a gun about five o'clock. It was foolish, but it made me uneasy.
"They've gone plumb crazy over that Mr. von Inwald," she declared. "It makes me tired. How do they know he's anything but what he says he is? He may be a messenger from the emperor of Austria, and he may be selling flannel chest protectors. Miss Cobb's all set up; she's talking about getting up an entertainment and asking that Miss Summers to recite."
She got up, leaving the basket on the hearth.
"And say," she said, "you ought to see that dog now. It's been soakin' in peroxide all day!"
She went out with the peroxide, but a moment later she opened the door and stuck her head in, nodding toward the basket.
"Say," she said, "the chef's getting fussy about the stuff I'm using in the diet kitchen. You've got to cut it out soon, Minnie. If I was you I'd let him starve."
"What!" I screeched, and grasped the rail of the spring.
"Let him starve!" she repeated.
"Wha—what are you talking about?" I demanded when I got my voice.
She winked at me from the doorway.
"Oh, I'm on all right, Minnie!" she assured me, "although heaven only knows where he puts it all! He's sagged in like a chair with broken springs."
I saw then that she thought I was feeding Senator Biggs on the sly, and I breathed again. But my nerves were nearly gone, and when just then I heard a shot from the direction of the deer park, even Tillie noticed how pale I got.
"I don't know what's come over you, Minnie," she said. "That's only Mr. Carter shooting rabbits. I saw him go out as I started down the path."
I was still nervous when I put on my shawl and picked up the basket. But there was a puddle on the floor and the soup had spilled. There was nothing for it but to go back for more soup, and I got it from the kitchen without the chef seeing me. When I opened the spring-house door again Mr. Pierce was by the fire, and in front of him, where I'd left the basket, lay a dead rabbit. He was sitting there with his chin in his hands looking at the poor thing, and there was no basket in sight.
"Well," I asked, "did you change my basket into a dead rabbit?"
"Basket!" he said, looking up. "What basket?"
I looked everywhere, but the basket was gone, and after a while I decided that Mr. Dick had had an attack of thoughtfulness (or hunger) and had carried it out himself.
And all the time I looked for the basket Mr. Pierce sat with the gun across his knees and stared at the rabbit.
"I'd thank you to take that messy thing out of here," I told him.
"Poor little chap!" he exclaimed. "He was playing in the snow, and I killed him—not because I wanted food or sport, Minnie, but—well, because I had to kill something."
"I hope you don't have those attacks often," I said. He looked at the rabbit and sighed.
"Never in my life!" he answered. "For food or sport, that's different, but—blood-lust!" He got up and put the gun in the corner, and I saw he looked white and miserable.
"I don't like myself to-night, Minnie," he said, trying to smile, "and nobody likes me. I'm going into the garden to eat worms!"
I didn't like to scold him when he was feeling bad anyhow, but business is business. So I asked him how long he thought people would stay if he acted as he had that day. I said that a sanatorium was a place where the man who runs it can't afford to have likes and dislikes; that for my part I'd a good deal rather he'd get rid of his excitement by shooting off a gun, provided he pointed it away from the house, than to sit around and let his mind explode and kill all our prospects. I told him, too, to remember that he wasn't responsible for the morals or actions of his guests, only for their health.
"Health!" he echoed, and kicked a chair. "Health! Why, if I wanted to keep a good dog in condition, Minnie, I wouldn't bring him here."
"No," I retorted, "you'd shut him in an old out oven, and give him a shoe to chew, and he'd come out in three days frisking and happy. But you can't do that with people."
"Why not?" he asked. "Although, of course, the supply of out ovens and old shoes is limited here."
"As far as Mr. von Inwald goes," I went on, "that's not your affair or mine. If Miss Patty's own father can't prevent it, why should you worry about it?"
"Precisely," he agreed. "Why should I? But I do, Minnie—that's the devil of it."
"There are plenty of nice girls," I suggested, feeling rather sorry for him.
"Are there? Oh, I dare say." He stooped and picked up his rabbit. "Straight through the head; not so bad for twilight. Poor little chap!"
He said good night and went out, taking the gun and the rabbit with him, and I went into the pantry to finish straightening things for the night. In a few minutes I heard voices in the other room, one Mr. Pierce's, and one with a strong German accent.
"When was that?" Mr. von Inwald's voice.
"A year ago, in Vienna."
"Where?"
"At the Bal Tabarin. You were in a loge. The man I was with told me who the woman was. It was she, I think, who suggested that you lean over the rail—"
"Ah, so!" said Mr. von Inwald as if he just remembered. "Ah, yes, I recall—I was with—the lady was red-haired, is it not? And it was she who desired me—"
"You leaned over the rail and poured a glass of wine on my head. It was very funny. The lady was charmed."
"I recall it perfectly. I remember that I did it under protest—it was a very fine wine, and expensive."
"Then you also recall," said Mr. Pierce, very quietly, "that because you were with a—well, because you were with a woman, I could not return your compliment. But I demanded the privilege at some future date when you were alone."
"It is a pity," replied Mr. von Inwald, "that now, when I am alone, there is no wine!"
"No, there is no wine," Mr. Pierce agreed slowly, "but there is—"
I opened the door at that, and both of them started. Mr. von Inwald was standing with his arms folded, and Mr. Pierce had one arm raised holding up a glass of spring water. In another second it would have been in the other man's face.
I walked over to Mr. Pierce and took the glass out of his hand, and his expression was funny to see.
"I've been looking everywhere for that glass," I said. "It's got to be washed."
Mr. von Inwald laughed and picked up his soft hat from the table.
He turned around at the door and looked back at Mr. Pierce, still laughing.
"Accept my apologies!" he said. "It was such a fine wine, and so expensive."
Then he went out.
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