Read Ebook: One Day A sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Glyn Elinor Dubious Author

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Ebook has 1170 lines and 51972 words, and 24 pages

ONE DAY

A SEQUEL TO "THREE WEEKS"

ANONYMOUS

Original Publication Date 1909, by The Macaulay Company

NEW YORK THE MACAULAY COMPANY 1912

THE SCHILLING PRESS NEW YORK

FOREWORD TO MY AMERICAN FRIENDS

Now after spending some very pleasant weeks in your interesting country, I feel sure that this book will find many sympathetic readers in America. Quite naturally it will be discussed; some, doubtless, will censure it--and unjustly; others will believe with me that the tale teaches a great moral lesson.

Born as the Boy was born, the end which Fate forced upon him, to me, was inevitable. Each word and act of the three weeks of his parents' love-idyl must reflect in the character and life of the child. Little by little the baby King grew before my mental vision until I saw at last there was no escape from his importunity and I allowed the insistent Boy--masterful even from his inception--to shape himself at his own sweet will. Thus he became the hero of my study.

This is not a book for children or fools--but for men and women who can grasp the underlying principle of morality which has been uppermost in my mind as I wrote. Those who can see beyond the outburst of passion--the overmastering belief in the power of love to justify all things, which the Boy inherited so naturally from his Queen mother--will understand the forces against which the young Prince must needs fight a losing battle. The transgression was unavoidable to one whose very conception was beyond the law--the punishment was equally inevitable.

In fairness to this book of mine--and to me--the great moral lesson I have endeavored to teach must be considered in its entirety, and no single episode be construed as the book's sole aim. The verdict on my two years' work rests with you, dear Reader, but at least you may be sure that I have only tried to show that those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.

ONE DAY

The Prince tore the missive fiercely from its envelope, and scowled at the mocking glint of the royal crown so heavily embossed at the top of the paper. What a toy it was, he thought, to cost so much, and eventually to mean so little! Roughly translated, the letter ran as follows:

"Your Royal Highness will be gratified to learn that at last a satisfactory alliance has been arranged between the Princess Elodie of Austria and your royal self. It is the desire of both courts and councils that the marriage shall be solemnized on the fifteenth of the May following your twenty-first birthday, at which time the coronation ceremony takes place that is to place the crown of the kingdom upon the head of the son of our beloved and ever-to-be-regretted Imperatorskoye. The Court and Council extend greetings and congratulations upon the not far distant approach of both auspicious events to your Royal Highness, which cannot fail to afford the utmost satisfaction in every detail to the ever-beautiful-and-never-to-be-sufficiently beloved Prince Paul.

"Imperator-to-be, we salute thee. We kiss thy feet."

The letter was sealed with the royal crest and signed by the Regent--the Boy's uncle--the Grand Duke Peter, his mother's brother, who had been his guardian and protector almost from his birth. The young prince knew that his uncle loved him, knew that the Grand Duke desired nothing on earth so much as the happiness of his beloved sister's only son--and yet at this crisis of the Boy's life, even his uncle was as powerless to help as was Paul Verdayne, the Englishman.

"The Princess Elodie!" he grumbled. "Who the devil is this Princess Elodie, anyway? Austrian blood has no particular charm for me! They might at least have told me something a little more definite about the woman they have picked out to be the mother of my children. A man usually likes to look an animal over before he purchases!"

Known to London society as Monsieur Zalenska, the Prince had come up to town with the Verdaynes, and was apparently enjoying to the utmost the frivolities of London life.

At a fashionable garden party he sat alone, in a seclusion he had long sought and had finally managed to secure, behind a hedge of hawthorn where none but lovers, and men and women troubled as he was troubled, cared to conceal themselves.

The letter, long-expected and dreaded, had finally crossed the continent to his hand. It was only the written confirmation of the sentence Fate had pronounced upon him, even as it had pronounced similar sentences upon princes and potentates since the beginning of thrones and kingdoms.

While the Prince--or Paul Zalenska, as I will now call him--sat in his brooding brown study, clutching the imperial letter tightly in his young hand, his attention was arrested by the sound of voices on the other side of the hawthorn hedge.

He listened idly, at first, to what seemed to be a one-sided conversation, in a dull, emotionless feminine voice--a discourse on fashion, society chit-chat, and hopeless nonentities, interspersed with bits of gossip. Could women never talk about anything else? he thought impatiently.

But his displeasure did not seem to affect the course of things at all. The voice, completely unconscious of the aversion it aroused in the invisible listener, continued its dreary, expressionless monotone.

"What makes you so silent, Opal? You haven't said a word to-day that you didn't absolutely have to say. If all American girls are as dreamy as you, I wonder why our English lords are so irresistibly attracted across the water when in search of brides!"

And then the Boy on the other side of the hedge felt his sluggish pulse quicken, and almost started to his feet, impelled by a sudden thrill of delight; for another voice had spoken--a voice of such infinite charm and sweetness and vitality, yet with languorous suggestion of emotional heights and depths, that he felt a vague sense of disappointment when the magnetic notes finally died away.

"To live, Opal? We are not dead, surely! What do you mean by life?"

And so her name was Opal! How curiously the name suited the voice! The Boy, as he listened, felt that no other name could possibly have matched that voice--the opal, that glorious gem in which all the fires of the sun, the iridescent glories of the rainbow, and the cold brilliance of ice and frost and snow seemed to blend and crystallize. All this, and more, was in that mysteriously fascinating voice.

The voice sank almost to the softness of a whisper, yet even then was vibrant, alive, intense.

The Boy held his breath now.

Who was this girl, anyhow, who seemed to express his own thoughts as accurately as he himself could have done? He was bored no longer. He was roused, stirred, awakened--and intensely interested. It was as though the voice of his own soul spoke to him in a dream.

The cold, lifeless voice now chimed in again. In his impatience the Boy clenched his fists and shut his teeth together hard. Why didn't she keep still? He didn't want to miss a single note he might have caught of the voice--that other! Why did this nonentity--for one didn't have to see her to be sure that she was that--have to interrupt and rob him of his pleasure?

"I don't understand you, Opal," she was saying. "I am sure that I live. And yet I have never felt that way--thank goodness! It's vulgar to feel too deeply, Mamma used to say, and as I have grown older, I can see that she was right. The best people never show any excess of emotion. That is for tragedy queens, operatic stars, and--the women we do not talk about! Ladies cultivate repose!"

"And yet, Alice, you are--married!"

"And you don't--love?"

The Boy was struck by a note that was almost horror in the opaline voice so near him.

"Love? Why, Opal, of course we do! It's easy to love, you know, when a man is decent and half-way good to one. I am sure I think a great deal of Algernon; but I dare say I should have thought as much of any other man I had happened to marry. That is a wife's duty!"

"You have strange ideas of life, Opal. I should be afraid to indulge them if I were you--really I should! You have lived so much in books that you seem to have a very garbled idea of the world. Fiction is apt to be much of a fairy tale, a crazy exaggeration of what living really consists of!"

There was a shocked note in the voice of the young English matron as she added the last word, and her voice sank to a whisper. But Paul Zalenska heard, and smiled.

"You are a peculiar girl, Opal, and--we don't say those things in England."

"And like a dutiful English wife, you mustn't fail to obey, I suppose! Lead the way, cousin mine, and I'll promise to follow you with due dignity and decorum."

And the rustle of silken skirts heralded the departure of the ladies away from the hedge and beyond Paul's hearing.

Then he too started at an eager, restless pace for the centre of the crowd. He had quite forgotten the future so carefully arranged for him, and was off in hot pursuit of--what? He did not know! He only knew that he had heard a voice, and--he followed!

As he rejoined the guests, he looked with awakened interest into every face, listened with eager intensity to every voice. But all in vain. It did not occur to him that he might easily learn from his hostess the identity of her American guest; and even if the thought had presented itself to him, he would never have acted upon it. The experience was his alone, and he would have been unwilling to share it with any one.

He was no longer bored as earlier in the afternoon, and he carried the assurance of enthusiasm and interest in his every glance and motion. People smiled at the solitary figure, and whispered that he must have lost Verdayne. But for once in his life, the Boy was not looking for his friend.

But neither did he find the voice!

The letter in his pocket no longer scorched the flesh beneath. He had forgotten its very existence, nor did he once think of the Princess Elodie of Austria. What had happened to him?

Had he fallen in love with a--voice?

It was May at Verdayne Place, and May at Verdayne Place was altogether different from May in any other part of the world. The skies were of a far deeper and richer blue; the flowers reached a higher state of fragrant and rainbow-hued perfection; the sun shining through the green of the trees was tempered to just the right degree of shine and shadow. To an Englishman, home is the beginning and the end of the world, and Paul Verdayne was a typical Englishman.

To be sure, it had not always been so, but Paul had outlived his vagabond days and had become thoroughly domesticated; yet there had been a time in his youth when the wandering spirit had filled his soul, when the love of adventure had lent wings to his feet, and the glory of romance had lured him to the lights and shadows of other skies than these. But Verdayne was older now, very much older! He had lived his life, he said, and settled down!

In the shade of the tall trees of the park, two men were drinking in the beauties of the season, in all the glory and splendor of its ever-changing, yet ever-enduring loveliness. One of them was past forty, the ripeness of middle age and the general air of a well-spent, well-directed, and fully-developed life lending to his face and form an unusual distinction--even in that land of distinguished men. His companion was a boy of twenty, straight and tall and proud, carrying himself with the regal grace of a Greek god. He was a strong, handsome, healthy, well-built, and well-instructed boy, a boy at whom any one who looked once would be sure to look the second time, even though he could not tell exactly wherein the peculiar charm lay. Both men were fair of hair and blue-eyed, with clear, clean skins and well-bred English faces, and the critical observer could scarcely fail to notice how curiously they resembled each other. Indeed, the younger of the pair might easily have been the replica of the elder's youth.

When they spoke, however, the illusion of resemblance disappeared. In the voice of the Boy was a certain vibrant note that was entirely lacking in the deeper tones of the man--not an accent, nor yet an inflection, but still a quality that lent a subtle suggestion of foreign shores. It was an expressive voice, neither languorous nor unduly forceful, but strangely magnetic, and adorably rich and full, and musical, thrilling its hearers with its suggestion of latent physical and spiritual force.

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