Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/The Scotch Embassy
VI.—THE SCOTCH EMBASSY
'Tis said, a python scared one day
The breathless city, till he came,
With forky tongue and eyes on flame,
Where the old king sat to judge alway;
••••
Seeing this, he did not dare
Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there.
Such grace had kings when the world begun!
WHAT a queer old place!” said Philippa, pausing halfway down the quiet side street, which Washington's traffic and activities had long since passed for all time. “It looks—it looks”—she paused for a simile—“it looks like a sort of Sleeping Beauty palace—as if nothing had been alive there for a hundred years!”
Her companion laughed. He was a fresh skinned young Englishman, who laughed often—not always too intelligently, or with the most scrupulous taste, but with a ready heartiness that caused men at his clubs to call him a jolly good sort. He paid his bridge debts, and managed to hang on to his under-secretaryship by his eyelids, so, as his embassy was a mighty one, he was accepted unquestioningly everywhere. The women, here and there, who had found him out, were silent concerning the experience. Each imagined hers to have been the only one of the sort, and ashamed of the fact.
He looked at Philippa Carpenter appraisingly. She was very lovely, he decided, in a curious fashion of her own. He had never seen such white skin, or such wine-red hair, or such exquisite eyes. And her clothes—Fulham prided himself, albeit secretly, on “knowing a thing or two” about feminine gear. His eye noted and approved the slim lines of her gray walking suit, the shimmer of her chinchilla, the rich note struck by the huge bunch of violets pinned upon her silvery muff. He roused himself from contemplating her, to answer her.
“Not much Sleeping Beauty about it,” he said. “Look at that bay window!”
Philippa looked. In the square, uncurtained aperture was a face—the face of an old man, yet singularly striking and compelling.
“What an extraordinary-looking person!” exclaimed Mrs. Carpenter, forgetting her usual tact and good manners, and standing still to stare. She loved queer people and queer happenings, and life had never been able to sap her interest in the great game of the days. Her purple eyes were always wide open, as if freshly startled by some amazing revelation. One felt, on gazing into them, that the hurt look one found there had come from the disappointment and frustration of large dreams.
She stared at the fine, strange old face in momentary, but complete absorption. Where had she seen him before? Pippa searched her memory—and it was a curiously retentive one for faces—and still she could not lay her hand upon the fugitive impression. Vaguely it suggested something romantic and spectacular. Was it a recollection of the stage? Or some famous picture? Around it crowded a ghostly horde of lesser associations, indefinitely debonair and gallant.
Cavaliers! That was what the old gentleman made her think of! The Cavaliers, that fought and gamed under the Pretender in exile, and the Merry Monarch in Whitehall. And then it came to her swiftly and certainly: the man at whom she was gazing—the old and bent, yet stately, gentleman, with the snow-white hair, mustache, and imperial, and the dark eyes full of ancient dreams—was the image of Charles Stuart, of England and Scotland!
At the same moment that she realized this, she became conscious that Fulham was speaking, the while he leaned against the iron railing and lighted a cigarette.
“The silly old chap actually thinks he's the Pretender, you know. The fellows all call this house the Scotch Embassy!”
Philippa was warmly interested, for, like all women, she was a congenital and irrational Jacobite; but she hated the tone of derision. Also, she did not like men to smoke in her presence without her permission. The very fact that her somewhat checkered career had robbed her of the right to demand respect made her the more sensitive concerning it. Men might make her suffer—several had—but no man could treat her casually and not live to regret it.
She pulled herself up and walked on with no further word.
“I say, you know,” said Fulham, following, “anything wrong?”
It was spring, spring in Washington, with the capitol showing like a white dream through a gap in the city block, with the maples hanging out a million pink tassels, and everybody watering his flower beds. A warm and genial gayety was in the air, and the sun felt like a shower of kisses.
During the following week, Pippa walked often past the quiet old house, with its bare windows and shabby front door. Sometimes there was no white-haired head to be seen; but when there was, the owner of the dark eyes always looked at her, with—she thought—a degree of kindliness. And one afternoon—typically April, with scudding clouds, and breezes, and gardens full of crocuses, and early tulips blooming all down the street—the big front door opened just as she was passing, and a shabby, shuffling figure came out.
It was not the old man of the window, but his servant—so much was evident. An old, old servitor he was, with a bald head and toothless gums, and clothes of some forgotten epoch. His voice was too weak to carry, but he waved a withered hand appealingly, and Pippa paused until he reached the sidewalk.
“My master,” wheezed the old fellow, “my master asks if madam will honor him”
He stopped to gasp. Clearly the haste had been almost too much for him.
“What is it that he wants me to do?” Pippa asked kindly.
“He prays madam to enter,” said the aged servant, bowing low before her.
Pippa looked past him to where the door stood open, showing a dark and seemingly empty hall.
“I will call upon your master with pleasure,” she said, for she loved adventures, and had always longed to pay homage to a king. The old man led the way, and in another moment she was inside the door, and in the “Scotch Embassy.”
The servant ushered her into a large, barren-looking room, and left her, still bowing deeply. The air of the place smelled musty, but two broad beams of afternoon sunlight slanted in through the bay windows.
By that soft, amber light, Pippa made out a dais at the end of the room, with a great chair upon it—carved Jacobean oak, golden brown, and as beautiful as bronze. Above it hung a picture, life size, of a man in black velvet, with a great plumed hat and melancholy eyes. Pippa recognized the face, even before she drew close enough to read in fine gold letters at the base of the painting the immortal word, “Remember.”
The next moment a faint sound caused her to turn. An old, but magnificent-looking man was standing before her, leaning on a gold-headed cane.
“Madam,” he said, in a voice that had not yet lost its compelling quality, “I am immeasurably privileged. Day after day I have watched you from my hermitage, until the longing grew too much for me. I said: 'I will talk with this sweet lady, and breathe the fragrance of youth again if only for a minute.' You are very gracious, dear madam, to have so humored an old man!”
He bowed over her hand in the manner of a forgotten day, and his white mustache just brushed her fingers. Pippa felt a little catch in her throat; somehow, in his dignity and his courtliness, he made her want to cry.
“I think,” she said gently, “that it should be the other way, shouldn't it? I should do you homage—sire!”
He straightened up and a light came into his dark eyes—clear eyes still, in spite of his years. She knew that in acknowledging his royalty, she had given him, perhaps, one of the most poignant moments of rapture in his life. With a smile that was almost gay, he said:
“No, madam, the Stuarts have always been ready to kneel before beautiful women!”
“And have found no lack of beautiful women to kneel before them,” she responded,
“Believe me,” said Charles Stuart, as he at last released her hand, “it is the women who, in kneeling, have stooped farther than the kings!”
“And yet,” urged Pippa, “they have been the more willing!”
The old man smiled.
“Alas!” he said, in his musical voice, “alas, that I am not thirty years younger—and on a throne!”
“I should have thought,” said Philippa demurely, “that your majesty were above such wishes!”
“Ah!” he struck in quickly, “but in such happy case—you should be a countess, sweet lady!”
“A king's favorite!” murmured Pippa, with sparkling eyes. “I have always longed to be a countess—sire! What name would you have given me?”
Charles Stuart shook his head in sudden sadness.
“I must lament my lack of high estates,” he said, in the quaint and graceful speech that Pippa loved. “But for a name—sweet and gracious madam, there could be but one: I must always, while I live, call you My Lady Loveliness!”
And so began the strangest, most fairylike time imaginable. Of such are dreams made—or the fancies that flit about us like moths under the sickle moon—or early-morning visions, while the birds are waking, and we are barely over the borderland of sleep. Fantasies and dreams, they spun themselves into a silken and silver web about the Scotch Embassy; and Pippa loved the dreams and wept over them, because they seemed vaguely suggestive of a requiem—a requiem in which Charles Stuart figured, yet not as one who had died.
In all of us is the need for play acting—for the irresponsible engrossment of games. One may take it out in social fencing, or in those little masquerades one acts with oneself, or one may starve it and grow old betimes—but it is there hidden in us all. In Pippa it was riotous. She adored “pretending” just as much as she had as a child, and the idea of “dressing up” still delighted her. She and her maid rummaged among her belongings until they had found such laces, and combs, and scarfs as she conceived to be suited to the part of a great lady at the Stuart court.
“En voilà, madame!” said voluble Hortense admiringly. “Que c'est superbe!”
In after years Pippa Carpenter was wont to look back upon that odd, magical time in the capital as one of her sweetest memories. Her brain was stored with records of things, “sad, and mad, and bad.” She had associations more or less dramatic and emotional, with almost as many places as her feet had tarried in. For, perhaps, the first time in many years, she found herself enthralled by an interest in which there was nothing of romance or of venture, nothing but a sentiment as delicate as the perfume from an old-time jar of potpourri.
She came often to see her old new friend. She no longer called it the Scotch Embassy—it was Charles Stuart's house; and the simplicity of this phrase pleased her. It seemed better suited to royalty than more ornate expressions. For she accepted his royalty as unquestioningly as 1f he had sat on his throne in London Town.
It was a gracious and graceful comedy that they acted—he playing at being a king, who knew himself a king, indeed; she wearing the fair arts and graces of a great lady, who had, in truth, been so born? Could mask be quainter? Both played themselves as if they were newly acquired rôles; and, with the rare and exquisite tact of great natures and great breeding, neither ever made a false step or jarred ever so faintly upon the other.
Outside the Scotch Embassy, Pippa's world was growing complicated. She escaped thankfully to the bare, big room with the dais, and the melancholy and gallant King Charles in his gilded frame. Fulham was becoming importunate. He had, as I have intimated, his caddish side. Women in Pippa's equivocal position were apt to discover it. He saw no further reason for finesse. This woman, all eyes and hair, with alabaster skin and a voice of gold—why should he not make love to her? She had been known to permit such things.
He was ridiculously jealous of her interest in Charles Stuart. It enraged him to think of her thoughts being so utterly absorbed in this “lifeless old mummy.” One afternoon, he walked with Pippa to the very door, and then, summoning a sort of bravado, entered with her. The old servant stared at him, bewildered and nonplused, and then closed the door with a trembling hand.
“What have you done this for?” asked Philippa, facing him. She really had not the smallest notion. Fulham's answer was to catch her hand, slim and cool, as it hung at her side.
“You never will see me alone,” he said thickly. “You spend your whole time”
“Stop, please!” said Pippa, in a very low, cold voice. “You are very rude—not to me, but to my friend, in whose house you are. Won't you please go?”
But all unwittingly she had made the fatal mistake of being too charming. Some turn of her head, or tint of her delicate cheek, sent the flood sharply to the man's face.
“No, by God, I won't!” he exploded. “I won't! Unless”
“Unless Unless” she repeated, with ominous calm. But whatever torrent of rage and resentment might have trembled on her lips never had a chance to pour forth. For at that moment, a light, slow step sounded behind them on the echoing floor of the bare old room. Charles Stuart, bent, fragile, yet infinitely dignified, stood there, regarding them with slightly knitted brows.
“Your pardon,” he said to Pippa gently. “You look distressed. Is it possible that”
He glanced from one to the other, and seemed to arrive at some speedy conclusion from the looks upon the two faces.
“He has been annoying you, madam,” he said to Mrs. Carpenter, not in a questioning tone, but as one who states a fact.
Then he turned to Fulham, who was flushing more and more duskily, with resentment, and also with a vague discomfort that he could not altogether analyze.
“Sir,” came the thin, old voice, indescribably, icily courteous, “may I ask your name?”
The younger man turned and faced him insolently.
“Fulham, of the British Embassy,” he returned shortly, with the brusque arrogance of his race and class.
Charles Stuart drew himself suddenly erect, and a light flashed into his faded eyes—a light, one would almost have said, of angry incredulity.
“The British?” he repeated, with a little ring in his voice. “The British Embassy, young man? Is it possible, then, that England has fallen so low as to send forth such as you to represent her abroad—men who insult ladies and bring the land into disrepute?”
Fulham flushed furiously. It seemed impossible for him to refrain from the one brief sneer, “Ladies?”
The old man drew in his breath sharply. It seemed to the young Englishman that the slender, age-burdened body towered above him for a moment.
“To a handful of men,” said Charles Stuart, “has been accorded an inestimable birthright—that of being born on English soil, under English rule. It is true, England is not what it was two hundred years ago, but it is still the sovereign power—the symbol for which men should be as willing to live as to die. Do you not know that every time an Englishman forgets to be honorable, forgets to be just, forgets to be courteous, forgets to be a gentleman—do you not know, young sir, that the whole shield of England takes on a touch of tarnish? If you do not know, take heed now, for it is I, Charles Stuart, who tell you!”
“And why on earth should you tell me?” said Fulham, with an ugly look.
“I speak for my people,” said the old man simply. He might have been speaking from a throne.
The next moment he had walked quietly from the room. Fulham, staring after him, saw that the old servant was holding the door open.
He was dismissed.
“This is preposterous,” growled Fulham furiously. “An old impostor”
“Is he so surely an impostor?” Pippa asked quietly. The Englishman stared at her, frankly surprised.
“But—naturally!” he exclaimed. “Surely you do not believe him to be the rightful King of England.”
“I know very little of right or wrong where kings are concerned,” Philippa said, with perfect gentleness. “I think most people know very little. It seems a matter of chance, largely. But I think he is—Charles Stuart.”
“But naturally!” the man said again, entirely bewildered. “That is his name!”
Mrs. Carpenter smiled. He did not understand,
One of his contemptible little side tricks suddenly leaped into his mind like a jack-in-the-box. He turned on Mrs. Carpenter with an ugly look.
“And does his majesty know just the sort of person his countess happens to be?” he asked, with an unpleasant sneer.
“I don't understand you,” said Pippa, her eyes narrowing slightly, as they did when she was puzzled or angry. For the moment she was both.
“Oh, don't you?” said Fulham insolently.
Instantly, Pippa did understand. The man, incredible as it might seem to her, meant to destroy one of the old man's pet illusions—the illusion of his lady's worthiness. Pippa knew that he clung to her and the cobweb vision he had made of her, as he could never have clung, in hot youth, to mortal woman, be she ever so ardent.
These obsessions of the spirit—is it not paradoxical and strange that it is given to such women as Pippa, and to such alone, to understand them? It seems that to comprehend truly the passionless in its most exquisite depths, one must have plumbed and exhausted the abysses of passion.
It is certain that Philippa Carpenter understood to the last breath and pulse Charles Stuart's sentiment for her, and that she found a tender rest in the poetry of it—an ineffable relief from the throb of that violent emotion which, is, in its very essence, without end or solace.
“I have never before made an appeal for mercy in my life,” said Philippa Carpenter quietly. “But this dear gentleman”—her voice caressed the old-fashioned phrase—“believes in me. It is, I find, a very wonderful thing to be believed in. I ask you not to take that away from me. If you have found a weapon, a means to spoil his faith in me, I ask you—I beg you, not to use it!”
“Lord! Do you care so much for the opinion of an old fool like that?” ejaculated the young man contemptuously. Philippa's eyes were wistful.
“He believes in me,” she said again, speaking softly.
Fulham flung up his head—his face was flushed and bloated.
“You think you can play with me!” he stormed huskily. “Well, you jolly well can't! You know I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you from the first. And Now do you understand?”
He flung out of the house with a violence that terrified the tremulous old servitor,
A minute later Charles Stuart had entered the room. He was arrayed in the garments of his grandfather's time, and looked at last—thought Pippa—well dressed. What hope to make a modern of a man like this? He was inherently, uncompromisingly associated with silks and satins, ruffles and rapiers. She delighted in the courtly figure he presented in his faintly yellowed white satin and flaming buckles, and it was quite without thought of effect that she swept him a deep, deep curtsy.
The old servant brought in a few frugal dishes and served them perfectly. Across the meager array of viands, Pippa and her king toasted each other, and exchanged compliments in the soft phrases of another generation. Almost Pippa could have believed that she had fallen asleep and dreamed the strangeness of all this. For she knew him to be the king—ah, yes! She knew him to be in good truth Charles Stuart, who could write “Rex” after his brief name.
And Pippa, at the piano, sang Jacobite airs—'*Bonnie Charlie” and other old Scotch songs, ending with a quaint setting of Browning's inimitable “Cavalier Tune”:
Kentish Sir Byng
Stood for his King!
As she sang, Charles Stuart seemed to grow younger and more alive. His old eyes sparkled, and his delicate hand, with a great ruby ring blazing upon it, tapped a light accompaniment on the carved oak arm of his chair.
“Ah!” he said, with a sigh, as the last spirited chord died away. “It is like magic, Loveliness; it transports one back to the days of gallantry—gallantry in the bower and in the field. The days of the Stuarts were the last days of gallantry, Loveliness!” And that he believed it was obvious.
Pippa nodded, smiling softly from the piano stool. She was looking very young and very charming that night. She had contrived to give her dress a mid-seventeenth-century touch here and there—a broad lace collar falling away from her bare shoulders, a puffed sleeve. Her primrose-yellow skirt, too, was fuller than the mode demanded, and her hair, with its soft, dark-red curls dropping on either side of the exquisite face, might, to an idealistic historian, have vaguely suggested Madam Carwell.
The windows were open and the April wind blew in, wet with recent rain and sweet with the budding trees that fringed the street. A hand organ in the distance played “Non ti scordar di me,” and some children passing laughed like a peal of bells. There was an ache in the evening. It seemed too poignant, too immediate, too insistent, to be permitted to enter this still, old room, with its unseen company of ghosts. Pippa, sitting in the semidarkness, felt the full sentiment of the hour tugging at her heartstrings. She was made like that, and suffered many pangs, solely from her unconscionable trick of adaptability, and a comprehension that was too keen.
Charles Stuart sat in the great chair in the twilight, and said no word as the room grew darker and darker. After a great while he spoke, and his voice was just a thread of sound in the spring dusk.
“Loveliness, shall we know each other on the other side?”
Pippa started slightly. “The other side!” she repeated. “What has set you to thinking such sad thoughts—sire?”
“They are not sad thoughts, sweet Countess Loveliness,” said the old man gently. “Death has always been a friendly figure to me—as to all of my house. I know no one of us that has met him without a smile. And for me—why, Loveliness, I have had you at my elbow, strengthening my fainting spirit day by day, if I had been tempted to forget the traditions of my race!”
Pippa went closer to him in the dimness, and sank silently on the step of the dais. Her head was almost at his knee, and he laid his hand upon it caressingly, yet impersonally “May my blessing bring you no ill, dear Loveliness!” he said softly.
There was silence, with the gusty April wind blowing in, and a distant sound of voices from the street. A light flared in—flung from some arc light at the corner.
There was a rap at the front door—no bells were permitted at that feudal portal. The old servant went down the hall slowly to open the door.
Pippa rose hurriedly, some instinct keener than reason warning her.
“Stay here!” she begged. “Let me see who it is.”
In the bare and shadowy hall she met Fulham, flushed with bravado, his face set in rather harder lines than were natural to him.
He was standing, flushed and defiant, in the flickering rays of the one dim hall light. He was in evening dress, and had apparently come from some big dinner. But in his hand was a paper.
“I've got it all here,” he began, loudly and aggressively. “Incidentally I've successfully exploded his fairy-tale pretensions to his throne, so that even he can see it, once for all! And as for you”
He had the grace to pause. “As for me?” said Philippa clearly.
He started to speak, then stopped.
With a quiet, a very gentle gesture, Pippa went back into the big room. She was gone some minutes. When she came back she was very white.
“You have proofs,” she said, in a halting, questioning voice, “proofs that he is not what he thinks himself?”
“Why—yes,” blustered the Englishman, but he began to feel bewildered.
Pippa stood aside and raised her arm, as if she raised an unseen curtain.
“Will you go in?” she said.
At the door Fulham paused.
In the great chair on the dais at the end of the room, sat Charles Stuart, with closed eyes and a smiling face. There was much in the still dignity of that pose to guide the eye to reverence; yet it was not that which made Fulham whiten and fall back a step.
Above the old man hung what seemed to be his picture—executed, perhaps, in a younger and happier day, but unquestionably mirroring his personality. What need of patents of royalty and intricate proofs of rank, when such simple insignia of kingship hung above his brow like a nimbus? The pale forehead, the finely modeled cheek—the whole expression of the splendid head—these things spoke more loudly than records or archives. The king was dead, and, in dying, was proved king for all times.
Pippa, with tears coursing down her face, looked at the young Englishman, and felt her heart swell as his eyes softened. “Will you go in?” she said again, very gently.
Fulham hesitated a second, his hat in his hand. Then he went in slowly and with bent head, as if to a king's levee.