IS excellency sat upright in his corner of the box, one hand clenched lightly on the plush-upholstered vamp, the other resting on his knee. Beyond bending his head to catch the remarks of his neighbor, the wife of a Balkan prime minister, very and heavily incrusted with diamonds, he scarcely once changed his pose, and the most careful scrutiny of his rather waxen countenance would not have revealed either amusement or boredom—or, indeed, any recognizable human emotion. In the intervals when the court orchestra, half hidden behind a bank of flowers, made its solemn bow in the direction of the grand-ducal box and took its departure, his excellency's eyes swept the theater, from the gallery, with its congested pack of gaping plebeians, to the sparkling, bowing, rustling grand circle, and thence to the grand-ducal box itself. There his glance lingered, and the prolongation of his unostentatious gaze might have been taken as significant of satisfaction.
The young Grand Duchess Louise and her newly found prince consort sat in their corners of their box, and maintained the unmoved bearing that is the one talent required of modern royalty. Possibly they were sustained by the knowledge that the real pivot of the situation was formed by his excellency rather than by themselves. The beautiful grand duchess, with her golden hair and her transparent skin and her blue dreamer's eyes, and her big, stocky, wooden-looking English husband, were just amusing puppets dancing at the end of his excellency's string. For his excellency ruled in the Grand Duchy of Lunéville—a little patch of the world that really exists, though necessarily under a nom de plume so far as this narrative is concerned, and is so tenderly coveted by its neighbors that its position resembles that of a much courted beauty amid a crowd of suitors.
His excellency, by dint of keeping one hand on his knee and the other on the plush vamp at all public functions for twenty years, and never losing his impassivity even before his valet, had won a reputation which wavered between that of Machiavelli and that of Bismarck. Even the bigwigs from the courts of the great suitors were rather afraid of him, not knowing quite what his unalterable moral and physical pose concealed; and the Lunévillians themselves, quiet, self-satisfied folk, would have gone down fighting to the last man rather than lose their diplomatic jewel.
In a word, his excellency was a little great man in a little great principality.
And now he stood at the zenith of his career. He had solved the problem that had secretly worried the good Lunévillians ever since, eighteen years ago, the toy cannons on the castle mound had announced the fact that the grand duchess had given birth to a daughter, and consequently—since Lunéville cared nothing for the —to a future ruler. The problem had been made no easier by the fact that it had fair hair, blue eyes, a transparent skin, and a romantic temperament—characteristics almost unique in the royal catalogues of the period.
The solution had been abnormally difficult to find. It had to be young, Protestant, tolerable, morally and physically. It had to be somebody and nobody in a breath—that is to say, of high birth and no importance. It could not belong to a reigning house, because other reigning houses would have shown temper; it could not be too inferior, because that would have insulted the quality of the problem; and it could not be too superior, because it would have been highly undesirable if it had entered Lunéville with any other feelings than those of humility and appreciation.
The search had been long and arduous, but there at last the result sat—the younger son of an impoverished English duke adorned with a new title, tightly bound in the pale-blue uniform of the Lunéville chevau-légers, rather red in the face, and inexpressibly wooden.
The Balkan lady touched his excellency on the arm with her fan.
“My best felicitations, cher comte. Quite a beautiful young man, considering. Perhaps a little—how shall I say?—truculent—a little sullen. But that will pass, no doubt, under her royal highness' softening influence”
“He will be managed,” his excellency returned, with his perfect, rather mysterious conviction.
Then, in answer to a summons brought by a blue-coated gentleman of the suite, he made his way through the labyrinth of passages to the grand-ducal box and kissed the small, white hand of the grand duchess and bowed to her consort with just the amount of deference and disregard to emphasize delicately their respective positions.