It was the first hint that offered of the enormous interest the countryside was taking in their meetings. And once—it was the seventh time, and it precipitated the scandal—they met out upon the breezy moorland under a clear moonlight, and talked in whispers there, for the night was warm and still.
Very soon they had passed from the realisation that in them and through them a new world of giantry shaped itself in the earth, from the contemplation of the great struggle between big and little, in which they were clearly destined to participate, to interests at once more personal and more spacious. Each time they met and talked and looked on one another, it crept a little more out of their subconscious being towards recognition, that something more dear and wonderful than friendship was between them, and walked between them and drew their hands together. And in a little while they came to the word itself and found themselves lovers, the Adam and Eve of a new race in the world.
They set foot side by side into the wonderful valley of love, with its deep and quiet places. The world changed about them with their changing mood, until presently it had become, as it were, a tabernacular beauty about their meetings, and the stars were no more than flowers of light beneath the feet of their love, and the dawn and sunset the coloured hangings by the way. They ceased to be beings of flesh and blood to one another and themselves; they passed into a bodily texture of tenderness and desire. They gave it first whispers and then silence, and drew close and looked into one another’s moonlit and shadowy faces under the infinite arch of the sky. And the still black pine-trees stood about them like sentinels.
The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, and it seemed to them the universe hung still. Only their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to be living together in a world where there is no death, and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to them that they sounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as none have ever reached before. Even for mean and little souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods …
You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met—frequently met—the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence—nothing but Giants and Pygmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him as her lover.
“If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!” gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick …
“I am told—” whispered the old Bishop of Frumps.
“New story upstairs,” said the first footman, as he nibbled among the dessert things. “So far as I can make out this here giant Princess—”
“They say—” said the lady who kept the stationer’s shop by the main entrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets for the State Apartments …
And then:
“We are authorised to deny—” said “Picaroon” in Gossip.
And so the whole trouble came out.
IV
“They say that we must part,” the Princess said to her lover.
“But why?” he cried. “What new folly have these people got into their heads?”
“Do you know,” she asked, “that to love me—is high treason?”
“My dear,” he cried; “but does it matter? What is their right—right without a shadow of reason—and their treason and their loyalty to us?”
“You shall hear,” she said, and told him of the things that had been told to her.
“It was the queerest little man who came to me with a soft, beautifully modulated voice, a softly moving little gentleman who sidled into the room like a cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he had anything significant to say. He is bald, but not of course nakedly bald, and his nose and face are chubby rosy little things, and his beard is trimmed to a point in quite the loveliest way. He pretended to have emotions several times and made his eyes shine. You know he is quite a friend of the real royal family here, and he called me his dear young lady and was perfectly sympathetic even from the beginning. ‘My dear young lady,’ he said, ‘you know—you mustn’t,’ several times, and then, ‘You owe a duty.’ ”
“Where do they make such men?”
“He likes it,” she said.
“But I don’t see—”
“He told me serious things.”
“You don’t think,” he said, turning on her abruptly, “that there’s anything in the sort of thing he said?”
“There’s something in it quite certainly,” said she.
“You mean—?”
“I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for worship by losing—our elementary freedom. And I was to have married that Prince—You know nothing of him though. Well, a pygmy Prince. He doesn’t matter. … It seems it would have strengthened the bonds between my country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagine it!—strengthening the bonds!”
“And now?”
“They want me to go on with it—as though there was nothing between us two.”
“Nothing!”
“Yes. But that isn’t all. He said—”
“Your specialist in tact?”
“Yes. He said it would be better for you, better for
