It was scarcely five o’clock the next day when Cartoner was conducted by a pageboy to the Bukatys’ rooms in the quiet old hotel in Kensington. The Princess Wanda was alone. She was dressed in black. There is in some Varsovian families a heritage of mourning to be worn until Poland is reinstated. She was slightly but strongly made. Like her father and her brother, there was a suggestion of endurance in her being, such as is often found in slightly made persons.
“I came as early as I could,” said Cartoner, and, as he spoke, the clock struck.
The princess smiled as she shook hands, and then perceived that she had not been intended to show amusement. Cartoner had merely made a rather naive statement in his low monotone. She thought him a little odd, and glanced at him again. She changed color slightly as she turned towards a chair. He was quite grave and honest.
“That is kind of you,” she said, speaking English without the least suspicion of accent; for she had had an English governess all her life. “My father will take it to mean that you wanted to come, and are not only taking pity on lonely foreigners. He will be here in a minute. He has just been called away.”
“It was very kind of him to ask me to call,” replied Cartoner.
There was a simple directness in his manner of speech which was quite new to the Princess Wanda. She had known few Englishmen, and her own countrymen had mostly the manners of the French. She had never met a man who conveyed the impression of purpose and of the habit of going straight towards his purpose so clearly as this. Cartoner had not come to pay an idle visit. She wondered why he had come. He did not rush into conversation, and yet his silence had no sense of embarrassment in it. His hair was turning gray above the temples. She could see this as he took a chair near the window. He was probably ten years older than herself, and gave the impression of experience and of a deep knowledge of the world. From living much alone he had acquired the habit of wondering whether it was worthwhile to say that which came into his mind—which is a habit fatal to social success.
“Monsieur Deulin dined with us last night,” said the princess, following the usual instinct that silence between strangers is intolerable. “He talked a great deal of you.”
“Ah, Deulin is a diplomatist. He talks too much.”
“He accuses you of talking too little,” said Wanda, with some spirit.
“You see, there are only two methods of leaving things unsaid, princess.”
“Which is diplomacy?” she suggested.
“Which is diplomacy.”
“Then I think you are both great artists,” she said, with a laugh, as the door opened and her father entered the room.
“I only come to ask you a question—a word,” said the prince. “Heavens! your English language! I have a man downstairs—a question of business—and he speaks the oddest English. Now what is the meaning of the word ‘jettison?’ ”
Cartoner gave him the word in French.
“Ah!” cried the prince, holding up his two powerful hands, “of course. How foolish of me not to guess. In a moment I will return. You will excuse me, will you not? Wanda will give you some tea.”
And he hurried out of the room, leaving Cartoner to wonder what a person so far removed above commerce could have to do with the word “jettison.”
The conversation returned to Deulin. He was a man of whom people spoke continually, and had spoken for years. In fact, two generations had found him a fruitful topic of conversation without increasing their knowledge of him. If he had only been that which is called a public man, a novelist or a singer, his fortune would have been easy. All his advertising would have been done for him by others. For there was in him that unknown quantity which the world must needs think magnificent.
“I want you to tell me all you know about him,” said the princess in her brisk way. “He is the only old man I have ever seen whose thoughts have not grown old too. And, of course, one wonders why. He is the sort of person who might do anything surprising. He might fall in love and marry, or something like that, you know. Papa says he is married already, and his wife is in a mad asylum. He says there is a tragedy. But I don’t. He has no wife—unless he has two.”
“I know nothing of that side of his life. I only know his career.”
“I do not care about his career,” said the princess, lightly. “I go deeper than careers.”
She looked at Cartoner with a wise nod and a shrewd look in her gay, blue eyes.
“A man’s career is only the surface of his life.”
“Then some men’s lives are all surface,” said Cartoner.
Wanda gave a little, half-pitying, half-contemptuous jerk of her head.
“Some men have the soul of an omnibus-horse,” she replied.
Cartoner reflected for a moment, looking gravely the while at this girl, who seemed to know so much of life and to have such singularly clear and decisive views upon it.
“What would you have them do beyond going on when required and stopping when expedient—and avoiding collisions?” he inquired.
“I should like them to break the omnibus up occasionally,” she answered, “and take a wrong turning sometimes, just to see if a little happiness lay that way.”
“Yes,” he laughed. “You are a Pole and a Bukaty. I knew it as soon as I saw you.”
“One must do something. We were talking of such things last night, and Monsieur Deulin said that his ideal combination in a man was an infinite patience and a sudden premeditated recklessness.”
“Now you have come down to a mere career again,” said Cartoner.
“Not necessarily.”
The prince came into the room again at this moment.
“What are you people discussing,”
