George!” he said, fervently, “Aleck, you are great – the greatest woman in the whole earth! I can’t ever learn the whole size of you. I can’t ever learn the immeasurable deeps of you. Here I’ve been considering myself qualified to criticize your game. I! Why, if I had stopped to think, I’d have known you had a lone hand up your sleeve. Now, dear heart, I’m all red-hot impatience – tell me about it!”
The flattered and happy woman put her lips to his ear and whispered a princely name. It made him catch his breath, it lit his face with exultation.
“Land!” he said, “it’s a stunning catch! He’s got a gambling-hall, and a graveyard, and a bishop, and a cathedral – all his very own. And all gilt-edged five-hundred-per-cent stock, every detail of it; the tidiest little property in Europe; and that graveyard – it’s the selectest in the world: none but suicides admitted; yes, sir, and the free-list suspended, too, all the time. There isn’t much land in the principality, but there’s enough: eight hundred acres in the graveyard and forty-two outside. It’s a sovereignty—that’s the main thing; LAND’S nothing. There’s plenty land, Sahara’s drugged with it.”
Aleck glowed; she was profoundly happy. She said:
“Think of it, Sally – it is a family that has never married outside the Royal and Imperial Houses of Europe: our grandchildren will sit upon thrones!”
“True as you live, Aleck – and bear scepters, too; and handle them as naturally and nonchantly as I handle a yardstick. It’s a grand catch, Aleck. He’s corralled, is he? Can’t get away? You didn’t take him on a margin?”
“No. Trust me for that. He’s not a liability, he’s an asset. So is the other one.”
“Who is it, Aleck?”
“His Royal Highness Sigismund-Siegfriend-Lauenfeld-Dinkelspiel-Schwartzenberg Blutwurst, Hereditary Grant Duke of Katzenyammer.”
“No! You can’t mean it!”
“It’s as true as I’m sitting here, I give you my word,” she answered.
His cup was full, and he hugged her to his heart with rapture, saying:
“How wonderful it all seems, and how beautiful! It’s one of the oldest and noblest of the three hundred and sixty-four ancient German principalities, and one of the few that was allowed to retain its royal estate when Bismarck got done trimming them. I know that farm, I’ve been there. It’s got a rope-walk and a candle-factory and an army. Standing army. Infantry and cavalry. Three soldier and a horse. Aleck, it’s been a long wait, and full of heartbreak and hope deferred, but God knows I am happy now. Happy, and grateful to you, my own, who have done it all. When is it to be?”
“Next Sunday.”
“Good. And we’ll want to do these weddings up in the very regalest style that’s going. It’s properly due to the royal quality of the parties of the first part. Now as I understand it, there is only one kind of marriage that is sacred to royalty, exclusive to royalty: it’s the morganatic.”
“What do they call it that for, Sally?”
“I don’t know; but anyway it’s royal, and royal only.”
“Then we will insist upon it. More – I will compel it. It is morganatic marriage or none.”
“That settles it!” said Sally, rubbing his hands with delight. “And it will be the very first in America. Aleck, it will make Newport sick.”
Then they fell silent, and drifted away upon their dream wings to the far regions of the earth to invite all the crowned heads and their families and provide gratis transportation to them.
Chapter VIII
During three days the couple walked upon air, with their heads in the clouds. They were but vaguely conscious of their surroundings; they saw all things dimly, as through a veil; they were steeped in dreams, often they did not hear when they were spoken to; they often did not understand when they heard; they answered confusedly or at random; Sally sold molasses by weight, sugar by the yard, and furnished soap when asked for candles, and Aleck put the cat in the wash and fed milk to the soiled linen. Everybody was stunned and amazed, and went about muttering, “What can be the matter with the Fosters?”
Three days. Then came events! Things had taken a happy turn, and for forty-eight hours Aleck’s imaginary corner had been booming. Up – up – still up! Cost point was passed. Still up – and up – and up! Cost point was passed. STill up – and up – and up! Five points above cost – then ten – fifteen – twenty! Twenty points cold profit on the vast venture, now, and Aleck’s imaginary brokers were shouting frantically by imaginary long-distance, “Sell! sell! for Heaven’s sake sell!”
She broke the splendid news to Sally, and he, too, said, “Sell! sell – oh, don’t make a blunder, now, you own the earth! – sell, sell!” But she set her iron will and lashed it amidships, and said she would hold on for five points more if she died for it.
It was a fatal resolve. The very next day came the historic crash, the record crash, the devastating crash, when the bottom fell out of Wall Street, and the whole body of gilt-edged stocks dropped ninety-five points in five hours, and the multimillionaire was seen begging his bread in the Bowery. Aleck sternly held her grip and “put up” as long as she could, but at last there came a call which she was powerless to meet, and her imaginary brokers sold her out. Then, and not till then, the man in her was vanished, and the woman in her resumed sway. She put her arms about her husband’s neck and wept, saying:
“I am to blame, do not forgive me, I cannot bear it. We are paupers! Paupers, and I am so miserable. The weddings will never come off; all that is past; we could not even buy the dentist, now.”
A bitter reproach was on Sally’s tongue: “I begged you to sell, but you—” He did not say it; he had not the heart to add a hurt to that broken and repentant spirit. A nobler thought came to him and he said:
“Bear up, my Aleck, all is not lost! You really never invested a penny of my uncle’s bequest, but only its unmaterialized future; what we have lost was only the incremented harvest from that future by your incomparable financial judgment and sagacity. Cheer up, banish these griefs; we still have the thirty thousand untouched; and with the experience which you have acquired, think what you will be able to do with it in a couple years! The marriages are not off, they are only postponed.”
These are blessed words. Aleck saw how true they were, and their influence was electric; her tears ceased to flow, and her great spirit rose to its full stature again. With flashing eye and grateful heart, and with hand uplifted in pledge and prophecy, she said:
“Now and here I proclaim—”
But she was interrupted by a visitor. It was the editor and proprietor of the Sagamore. He had happened into Lakeside to pay a duty-call upon an obscure grandmother of his who was nearing the end of her pilgrimage, and with the idea of combining business with grief he had looked up the Fosters, who had been so absorbed in other things for the past four years that they neglected to pay up their subscription. Six dollars due. No visitor could have been more welcome. He would know all about Uncle Tilbury and what his chances might be getting to be, cemeterywards. They could, of course, ask no questions, for that would squelch the bequest, but they could nibble around on the edge of the subject and hope for results. The scheme did not work. The obtuse editor did not know he was being nibbled at; but at last, chance accomplished what art had failed in. In illustration of something under discussion which required the help of metaphor, the editor said:
“Land, it’s a tough as Tilbury Foster! – as we say.”
It was sudden, and it made the Fosters jump. The editor noticed, and said, apologetically:
“No harm intended, I assure you. It’s just a saying; just a joke, you know – nothing of it. Relation of yours?”
Sally crowded his burning eagerness down, and answered with all the indifference he could assume:
“I – well, not that