The Terrible Twins Part 20

"I don't think there's much chance of your getting strong in that peach-garden. It didn't feel to me like the open air at all," said the Terror firmly.

"But it is the open air," said the princess.

They came out of the narrow path they had been following into a broader one, and presently they turned aside from that at the foot of a steep and pathless bank. The Twins started up it as if it were neither here nor there to them; as, indeed, it was not.

But the princess stopped short, and said in a tone of dismay:

"Am I to climb this?"

The Terror stopped, looked at her dismayed face, set his bicycle against the trunk of a tree, and said:

"I'll help you up."

With that, dismissing etiquette from his mind, he slipped his arm round the slender waist of the princess, and firmly hauled her to the top of the bank. He relieved her of most of the effort needed to mount it; but none the less she reached the top panting a little.

"You certainly aren't in very good training," he said rather sadly.

"Training? What is training?" said the princess.

"It's being fit," said Erebus in a faintly superior tone.

"And what is being fit?" said the princess.

"It's being strong--and well--and able to run miles and miles," said Erebus raising her voice to make her meaning clearer.

"You needn't shout at her," said the Terror.

"I'm trying to make her understand," said Erebus firmly.

"But I do understand--when it is not the slang you are using. I know English quite well," said the princess.

"You certainly speak it awfully well," said the Terror politely.

He went down the bank and hauled up his bicycle. They went a little deeper into the wood and reached their goal, the banks of a small pool.

They sat down in a row, and the princess looked at its cool water, in the cool green shade of the tall trees, with refreshed eyes.

"This _is_ different," she said with a faint little sigh of pleasure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "This is different," she said.]

"Yes; this is the real open air," said the Terror.

"But I do get lots of open air," protested the princess. "Why, I sleep with my window open--at least that much." She held out her two forefingers some six inches apart. "The baroness did not like it. She said it was very dangerous and would give me the chills. But Doctor Arbuthnot said that it must be open. I think I sleep better."

"We have our bedroom windows as wide open as they'll go; and then they're not wide enough in this hot weather," said Erebus in the tone of superiority that was beginning to sound galling.

"I think if you took off your hat and jacket, you'd be cooler still,"

said the Terror rather quickly.

The princess hesitated a moment; then obediently she took off her hat and jacket, and breathed another soft sigh of pleasure. She had quite lost her air of discomfort and boredom. Her eyes were s.h.i.+ning brightly; and her pale cheeks were a little flushed with the excitement of her situation.

It is by no means improbable that the Twins, as well-brought-up children, were aware that it is not etiquette to speak to royal personages unless they first speak to you. If they were, they did not let that knowledge stand in the way of the gratification of their healthy curiosity. It may be they felt that in the free green wood the etiquette of courts was out of place. At any rate they did not let it trammel them; and since their healthy curiosity was of the liveliest kind they submitted the princess to searching, even exhaustive, interrogation about the life of a royal child at a German court.

They questioned her about the hour she rose, the breakfast she ate, the lessons she learned, the walks she took, the lunch she ate, the games she played, her afternoon occupations, her dolls, her pets, her tea, her occupations after tea, her dinner, her occupations after dinner, the hour she went to bed.

There seemed nothing impertinent in their curiosity to the princess; it was only natural that every detail of the life of a person of her importance should be of the greatest interest to less fortunate mortals. She was not even annoyed by their carelessness of etiquette in not waiting to be spoken to before they asked a question. Indeed she enjoyed answering their questions very much, for it was seldom that any one displayed such a genuine interest in her; it was seldom, indeed, that she found herself on intimate human terms with any of her fellow creatures. She had neither brothers nor sisters; and she had never had any really sympathetic playmates. The children of Ca.s.sel-Na.s.sau were always awed and stiff in her society; their minds were hara.s.sed by the fear lest they should be guilty of some appalling breach of etiquette. The manner of the Twins, therefore, was a pleasant change for her. They were polite, but quite unconstrained; and the obsequious people by whom she had always been surrounded had never displayed that engaging quality, save when, like the baroness, they were safely asleep in her presence.

But her account of her glories did not have the effect on her new friends she looked for. As she exposed more and more of the trammeling net of etiquette in which from her rising to her going to bed she was enmeshed, their faces did not fill with the envy she would have found so natural on them; they grew gloomy.

At the end of the interrogation Erebus heaved a great sigh, and said with heart-felt conviction:

"Well, thank goodness, I'm not a princess! It must be perfectly awful!"

"It must be nearly as bad to be a prince," said the Terror in the gloomy tone of one who has lost a dear illusion.

The princess could not believe her ears; she stared at the Twins with parted lips and amazed incredulous eyes. Their words had given her the shock of her short lifetime. As far as memory carried her back, she had been a.s.sured, frequently and solemnly, that to be a princess, a German princess, a Hohenzollern princess, was the most glorious and delightful lot a female human being could enjoy, only a little less glorious and delightful than the lot of a German prince.

"B-b-but it's sp-p-plendid to be a princess! Everybody says so!" she stammered.

"They were humbugging you. You've just made it quite clear that it's horrid in every kind of way. Why, you can't do any single thing you want to. There's always somebody messing about you to see that you don't," said Erebus with cold decision.

"B-b-but one is a _p-p-princess_," stammered the princess, with something of the wild look of one beneath whose feet the firm earth has suddenly given way.

The Terror perceived her distress; and he set about soothing it.

"You're forgetting the food," he said quickly to Erebus. "I don't suppose she ever has to eat cold mutton; and I expect she can have all the sweets and ices she wants."

"Of course," said the princess; and then she went on quickly: "B-b-but it isn't what you have to eat that makes it so--so--so important being a princess. It's--"

"But it's awfully important what you have to eat!" cried the Terror.

"I should jolly well think so!" cried Erebus.

The princess tried hard to get back to the moral sublimities of her exalted station; but the Twins would not have it. They kept her firmly to the broad human questions of German cookery and sweets. The princess, used to having information poured into her by many elderly but bespectacled gentlemen and ladies, was presently again enjoying her new part of dispenser of information. Her cheeks were faintly flushed; and her eyes were sparkling in an animated face.

In these interrogations and discussions the time had slipped away unheeded by the interested trio. The crimson baroness had awakened, missed her little charge, and waddled off into the house in search of her. A slow search of the house and gardens revealed the fact that she was not in them. As soon as this was clear the baroness fell into a panic and insisted that the whole household should sally forth in search of her.

The princess was earnestly engaged in an effort to make quite dear to the Twins the exact nature of one of the obscure kinds of German tartlet, a kind, indeed, only found in the princ.i.p.ality of Ca.s.sel-Na.s.sau, where the keen ears of the Terror caught the sound of a distant voice calling out.

He rose sharply to his feet and said: "Listen! There's some one calling. I expect they've missed you and you'll have to be getting back."

The princess rose reluctantly. Then her face clouded; and she said in a tone of faint dismay: "Oh, dear! How annoyed the baroness will be!"

"You take a great deal too much notice of that baroness," said Erebus.

"But I have to; she's my--my _gouvernante_," said the princess.