King John of Jingalo Part 42

"Certainly not, sir; had she been recognized the thing could never have happened. She must to some extent have altered her dress and her appearance: as to that I have no particulars. The name she actually went in under was Ann Juggins."

"Preposterous!" exclaimed the King. "And supposing that were to come out!"

"That is the trouble, sir. Without the full and immediate exercise of your authority, I fear it may. As a matter of fact, that is why she still remains where we found her."

"Oh! Stuff and nonsense!" cried the King. "You don't come for my authority in cases of this kind. Let her out, let her out! and say nothing more about it!"

"The Prefect, sir, has already been to see her, and she refuses to be let out; that is to say, declares that if she is not allowed to serve her full sentence she will make the whole of the affair public."

"Public?"

"Name and all. There was her ultimatum; she made a special point of it.

Her Highness seems somehow to be aware that the name is an impossible one, a weapon against which no Government department could stand. The word 'Juggins,'--only think, sir, what it means! Here we have a ridiculous, a most lamentable blunder committed by the police, sufficient of itself to cause us the gravest embarra.s.sment; and then to have on the top of it all this name with its ridiculous a.s.sociation rising up to confound us. We should go down as 'the Juggins Cabinet'; the word would be cried after us by every errand-boy in the street--the Government would become impossible."

The King did his best to conceal his delight at the predicament in which Charlotte's escapade had, by the confession of its Chief, placed the Cabinet. This tyrannical Government, in spite of its large majority, its strong party organization, and its bureaucratic powers, was unable to stand up against ridicule; a mere breath, and all its false pretensions to dignity would be exposed, and its dry bones, speciously clad in strong armor, would rattle down into the dust.

And if he chose to use this knowledge suddenly gained, what a power it would give him! Yes; he had only to send for Charlotte and bid her cry 'Juggins,' and that which, with so many months of anxious toil and with threat of abdication, he had failed to bring about, would immediately accomplish itself in other ways. But unfortunately the King was a man of scrupulous conscience, and was bound by his ideas of what became a monarch and a gentleman. He may have been quite mistaken in regarding as unclean the weapon with which Heaven had supplied him; but as he did so regard it, one must reluctantly admit that he was right to throw it aside.

"Well," he said, when the Prime Minister had finished, "she must be made not to tell, that's all!"

"I fear, sir, she is very determined."

"Determined to do what?"

"To serve out her sentence."

The King sat and thought for a while. He knew his Charlotte better than the police did; and, besides that, during the past week he had quite made up his mind that the Prefect of Police was in some matters a blunderer. "I wonder how he tried to get her out," he meditated aloud.

"Did she send me any message?"

"Nothing direct, sir, that I know of; but I take it that her ultimatum was also directed against any possible action on the part of your Majesty. She was quite determined to do her full time; said indeed that you had promised her a fortnight. What that may mean, I do not know."

"Oh, really!" cried the King, "the folly of the official mind is past all believing,--especially when it concentrates itself in the police force! Let somebody go to that poor child and tell her that her father and mother have had a bomb thrown at them, and are trying to recover themselves in the grief caused by her absence! And then unchain her (you keep them in chains, I suppose?), open the door of her prison, and see how she'll run! And tell the Prefect," he added, "that I cannot present him with my compliments."

The King was quite right. In case Charlotte should refuse to believe the official word, she was shown a newspaper with lurid ill.u.s.trations; and within an hour's time she was back at the palace, weeping, holding her father and mother alternately in her arms, and scolding them for all the world as though they had been guilty of outrageous behavior, and not she.

And, after all, it was a very good way of getting over the preliminaries of a rather awkward meeting.

IV

But when the first transports of joy at that reunion were over, they had to settle down to naughty facts and talk with serious disapproval to Charlotte of her past doings. And as they did so, though she still wept a little, the Princess observed with secret satisfaction that she had at any rate cured her mother of one thing--of knitting, namely, while a daughter's fate was being dangled in the parental balance.

From that day on when Charlotte showed that she was really in earnest the Queen put down her knitting; and those who have lived under certain domestic conditions where tyranny is always, as though by divine right, benevolent, wise, self-confident, and self-satisfied to the verge of conceit, will recognize that this in itself was no inconsiderable triumph.

Charlotte was quite straightforward as to why she had done the thing; she had done it partly out of generous enthusiasm for a cause which she did not very well understand, but to which certain friends of hers had attached themselves with a blind and dogged obstinacy (two of those friends she had left in prison behind her); but more because she wished to supply an object lesson of what she was really like to the Prince of Schnapps-Wa.s.ser.

She insisted that he was to be told all about it. And the Queen was in despair.

"Tell him that you have been in jail like a common criminal for a.s.saulting the police? I couldn't, it would break my heart! I should die of the shame of it."

"Very well," said Charlotte, "I will tell him myself, then; you can't prevent me doing that! No, I'm not going to be headstrong, or foolish, or obstinate, or any of the things you said I was: now I've made the exhibition of myself that I intended making, I'll be a lamb. If I like him enough, and if he likes me enough, I'll marry him. But I shall have to like him a great deal more than I do at present; and he will have to want me very much more than it's possible for him to do until he has seen me----"

"Oh, don't be so conceited, my dear!" said the Queen, her good-humor and confidence beginning to be restored as she watched the fair flushed face, and those queer attractive little gestures which made her daughter's charm so irresistible.

"Before anything will induce me to say 'yes,'" concluded Charlotte.

And then, as though that finished the matter, and as though her own naughty doings were of no further interest, she cried: "And now tell me about the bomb!" And the Queen, who still liked to dwell upon that episode of sights, sounds, and sensations, strangely mingled and triumphantly concluded by a popular ovation such as she had never met with in her life before, started off at once on a detailed narrative, corrected now and then by the King's more sober commentary, and aided by the eager questions of her daughter, who sat in close and fond contact with both of them, mopping her eyes alternately with her mother's handkerchief and her own.

"Oh! why wasn't I there?" she cried incautiously, when word came of the great popular reception crowning all.

"Ah! why weren't you?" inquired the King waggishly. And when he had made that little joke at her, Charlotte knew that all her naughty goings off and goings on were comfortably forgiven and done with.

"But you know, papa," she said later, when for the first time they were alone together, "I have found out quite a lot of things that _you_ know nothing about: quite dreadful things! And they are going on behind your back, and women are being put into prison for it."

All this was said very excitedly, and with great earnestness and conviction.

"My dear," said the King, "it's no use your talking about those Women Chartists to me."

"But I'm one of them," said Charlotte.

"Nonsense; you are not."

"I am. I signed on. I couldn't have gone to prison for them if I hadn't."

"Do any of them know who you are?" cried the King, aghast. It was a disturbing thought, for what a power it would be in their hands, and he had always heard how unscrupulous they were.

"Only one or two," declared Charlotte, "and they won't tell unless I tell them to. They are wonderful people, papa!"

The King sighed; for the very name of them had become a weariness to him. The whole agitation, with its dim confused scufflings against law and order, and its demonstrations idiotically recurring at the most inopportune moments, had profoundly vexed him. Years ago he had received the bland a.s.surance of his ministers that the whole thing would soon die down and cease; but it was still going on, and was now taking to itself worse forms than ever.

"What is it that they want?" he exclaimed, not quite meaning it as a question; rather as expressing the opinion that the subject was a hopeless one.

"They want a great many things," said his daughter; "they've got what they call 'grievances'; I know very little about them; they may be right or wrong--that isn't the point. The only thing that concerns you, papa, is that they want to come and see you; and they are not allowed to."

"Come and see me?"

"Yes; bring you a pet.i.tion."

"What about?"

"To have their grievances looked into."

"_I_ can't look into their grievances."

"No; but you can say that they shall be."

The King shook his head. Charlotte did not know what she was talking about.

"Yes, papa, that is the position. Of course you haven't the right to make laws or levy taxes, but you can send word to Parliament to say something has got to be considered and decided. And about this, Parliament won't consider and won't decide. And that is why they are trying to get to you with a pet.i.tion; so that you shall say that it is to be looked into."