THE PRINCESS ALINE
I
H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald came into the
life of Morton Carlton--or "Morney" Carlton, as men called
him--of New York city, when that young gentleman's affairs and
affections were best suited to receive her. Had she made her
appearance three years sooner or three years later, it is
quite probable that she would have passed on out of his life
with no more recognition from him than would have been
expressed in a look of admiring curiosity.
But coming when she did, when his time and heart were both
unoccupied, she had an influence upon young Mr. Carlton which
led him into doing several wise and many foolish things, and
which remained with him always. Carlton had reached a point
in his life, and very early in his life, when he could afford
to sit at ease and look back with modest satisfaction to what
he had forced himself to do, and forward with pleasurable
anticipations to whatsoever he might choose to do in the
future. The world had appreciated what he had done, and had
put much to his credit, and he was prepared to draw upon this
grandly.
At the age of twenty he had found himself his own master, with
excellent family connections, but with no family, his only
relative being a bachelor uncle, who looked at life from the
point of view of the Union Club's windows, and who objected to
his nephew's leaving Harvard to take up the study of art in
Paris. In that city (where at Julian's he was nicknamed the
junior Carlton, for the obvious reason that he was the older
of the two Carltons in the class, and because he was well
dressed) he had shown himself a harder worker than others who
were less careful of their appearance and of their manners.
His work, of which he did not talk, and his ambitions, of
which he also did not talk, bore fruit early, and at
twenty-six he had become a portrait-painter of international
reputation. Then the French government purchased one of his
paintings at an absurdly small figure, and placed it in the
Luxembourg, from whence it would in time depart to be buried
in the hall of some provincial city; and American
millionaires, and English Lord Mayors, members of Parliament,
and members of the Institute, masters of hounds in pink coats,
and ambassadors in gold lace, and beautiful women of all
nationalities and conditions sat before his easel. And so
when he returned to New York he was welcomed with an
enthusiasm which showed that his countrymen had feared that
the artistic atmosphere of the Old World had stolen him from
them forever. He was particularly silent, even at this date,
about his work, and listened to what others had to say of it
with much awe, not unmixed with some amusement, that it should
be he who was capable of producing anything worthy of such
praise. We have been told what the mother duck felt when her
ugly duckling turned into a swan, but we have never considered
how much the ugly duckling must have marvelled also.
"Carlton is probably the only living artist," a brother artist
had said of him, "who fails to appreciate how great his work
is." And on this being repeated to Carlton by a good-natured
friend, he had replied cheerfully, "Well, sorry, but it is
certainly better to be the only one who doesn't appreciate it
than to be the only one who does."
He had never understood why such a responsibility had been
intrusted to him. It was, as he expressed it, not at all in
his line, and young girls who sought to sit at the feet of the
master found him making love to them in the most charming
manner in the world, as though he were not entitled to all the
rapturous admiration of their very young hearts, but had to
sue for it like any ordinary mortal. Carlton always felt as
though some day some one would surely come along and say:
"Look here, young man, this talent doesn't belong to you; mine. What do you mean by pretending that such an idle
good-natured youth as yourself is entitled to such a gift of
genius?" He felt that he was keeping it in trust, as it were;
that it had been changed at birth, and that the proper
guardian would eventually relieve him of his treasure.
Personally Carlton was of the opinion that he should have been
born in the active days of knights-errant--to have had nothing
more serious to do than to ride abroad with a blue ribbon
fastened to the point of his lance, and with the spirit to
unhorse any one who objected to its color, or to the claims of
superiority of the noble lady who had tied it there. There
was not, in his opinion, at the present day any sufficiently
pronounced method of declaring admiration for the many lovely
women this world contained. A proposal of marriage he
considered to be a mean and clumsy substitute for the older
way, and was uncomplimentary to the many other women left
unasked, and marriage itself required much more constancy than
he could give. He had a most romantic and old-fashioned ideal
of women as a class, and from the age of fourteen had been a
devotee of hundreds of them as individuals; and though in that
time his ideal had received several severe shocks, he still
believed that the "not impossible she" existed somewhere, and
his conscientious efforts to find out whether every women he
met might not be that one had led him not unnaturally into
many difficulties.
"The trouble with me is," he said, "that I care too much to
make Platonic friendship possible, and care enough to
marry any particular woman--that is, of course, supposing that
any particular one would be so little particular as to be
willing to marry me. How embarrassing it would be, now," he
argued, "if, when you were turning away from the chancel after
the ceremony, you should look at one of the bridesmaids and
see the woman whom you really should have married! How
distressing that would be! You couldn't very well stop and
say: `I am very sorry, my dear, but it seems I have made a
mistake. That young woman on the right has a most interesting
and beautiful face. I am very much afraid that she is the
one.It would be too late then; while now, in my free state,
I can continue my, search without any sense of
responsibility."
"Why"--he would exclaim--"I have walked miles to get a glimpse
of a beautiful woman in a suburban window, and time and time
again when I have seen a face in a passing brougham I have
pursued it in a hansom, and learned where the owner of the
face lived, and spent weeks in finding some one to present me,
only to discover that she was self-conscious or uninteresting
or engaged. Still I had assured myself that she was not the
one. I am very conscientious, and I consider that it is my
duty to go so far with every woman I meet as to be able to
learn whether she is or is not the one, and the sad result is
that I am like a man who follows the hounds but is never in at
the death."
"Well," some married woman would say, grimly, "I hope you will
get your deserts some day; and you WILL, too. Some day some
girl will make you suffer for this."
"Oh, that's all right," Carlton would answer, meekly. "Lots
of women have made me suffer, if that's what you think I need."
"Some day," the married woman would prophesy, "you will care
for a woman so much that you will have no eyes for any one
else. That's the way it is when one is married."
"Well, when that's the way it is with ME," Carlton would
reply, "I certainly hope to get married; but until it is, I
think it is safer for all concerned that I should not."
Then Carlton would go to the club and complain bitterly to one
of his friends.
"How unfair married women are!" he would say. "The idea of
thinking a man could have no eyes but for one woman! Suppose
I had never heard a note of music until I was twenty-five
years of age, and was then given my hearing. Do you suppose
my pleasure in music would make me lose my pleasure in
everything else? Suppose I met and married a girl at
twenty-five. Is that going to make me forget all the women I
knew before I met her? I think not. As a matter of fact, I
really deserve a great deal of credit for remaining single,
for I ...
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