‘How?’ I inquired.

’How, Richie?  Where is your perspicuity?  I have him here.  I loosen a thousand tongues on him.  I—­’

‘No, not on him; on the princess, you mean.’

’On him.  The princess is the willing party; she and you are one.  On him, I say.  ’Tis but a threat:  I hold it in terrorem.  And by heaven, son Richie, it assures me I have not lived and fought for nothing.  “Now is the day and now is the hour.”  On your first birthday, my boy, I swore to marry you to one of the highest ladies upon earth:  she was, as it turns out, then unborn.  No matter:  I keep my oath.  Abandon it? pooh! you are—­forgive me—­silly.  Pardon me for remarking it, you have not that dashing courage—­never mind.  The point is, I have my prince in his trap.  We are perfectly polite, but I have him, and he acknowledges it; he shrugs:  love has beaten him.  Very well.  And observe:  I permit no squire-of-low-degree insinuations; none of that.  The lady—­all earthly blessings on her!—­does not stoop to Harry Richmond.  I have the announcement in the newspapers.  I maintain it the fruit of a life of long and earnest endeavour, legitimately won, by heaven it is! and with the constituted authorities of my native land against me.  Your grandad proposes formally for the princess to-morrow morning.’

He maddened me.  Merely to keep him silent I burst out in a flux of reproaches as torrent-like as his own could be; and all the time I was wondering whether it was true that a man who talked as he did, in his strain of florid flimsy, had actually done a practical thing.

The effect of my vehemence was to brace him and make him sedately emphatic.  He declared himself to have gained entire possession of the prince’s mind.  He repeated his positive intention to employ his power for my benefit.  Never did power of earth or of hell seem darker to me than he at that moment, when solemnly declaiming that he was prepared to forfeit my respect and love, die sooner than ‘yield his prince.’  He wore a new aspect, spoke briefly and pointedly, using the phrases of a determined man, and in voice and gesture signified that he had us all in a grasp of iron.  The charge of his having plotted to bring it about he accepted with exultation.

‘I admit,’ he said, ’I did not arrange to have Germany present for a witness besides England, but since he is here, I take advantage of the fact, and to-morrow you will see young Eckart down.’

I cried out, as much enraged at my feebleness to resist him, as in disgust of his unscrupulous tricks.

‘Ay, you have not known me, Richie,’ said he.  ’I pilot you into harbour, and all you can do is just the creaking of the vessel to me.  You are in my hands.  I pilot you.  I have you the husband of the princess within the month.  No other course is open to her.  And I have the assurance that she loses nothing by it.  She is yours, my son.’