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The town prided itself on knowing how to behave to royalty; and every day when the King went down to take the waters, or strolled in the municipal gardens, people pretended not to look at him; and only when he was not actually there did the conductor of the famous band, in the ranks of which operatic first-fiddles kept themselves in practice during their summer holidays only then did the conductor throw out a delicate compliment, for chance ear-shot, by performing, with variations such as were heard nowhere else, the National Anthem of Jingalo.
Once that was done there could be no hushing up of the matter; all Jingalo, nay, all Europe, would have to hear of it, including, of course, the Prince of Schnapps-Wasser; and so, at all costs of private strain and anxiety, it was necessary to conceal as long as possible that the Princess was not where she ought to be, and was perhaps where she ought not to be.
Nobody in Jingalo knows to this day what finally induced the Prime Minister to concede so unexpectedly that preliminary point of vantage a mere foothold among the interstices of the ministerial program which the Women Chartists had so long and vainly striven for. What use they made of the opportunity thus accorded has now become a matter of history: we need not go into it here.
"No, no, don't say 'glad," protested the King; "in a way I am sorry, even. I only wanted it to be anonymous. One can do things anonymously. How did it come about?" "It was the work of an incendiary." "How do you know that?" "There was absolute proof, something which refused to burn, a box of matches made in Jingalo, or some other fire-resistant of a similar kind. The perpetrator got off.
They came in silken court-cassocks, preceded by their croziers and followed by their women-folk, a nice expression of that ecclesiastical and domestic blend on which the Church of Jingalo prided itself.
Not for nothing was John of Jingalo the son of his father, not for nothing a descendant of kings who so far as they consciously achieved power had always held it possessively and exclusively, withholding the key from their heirs. Post obits were not popular in that royal House of Ganz-Wurst which for two hundred years had ruled over Jingalo.
These maps of Europe he turned from century to century; and there, as he marked their many variations, there always to be recognized was Jingalo occupying its proud historical position so often challenged, yet still on the whole unchanged.
The men who laid it down performed their task as though the eye of the whole nation were upon them; and even upon the Stock Exchange one learned that the rise and fall of prices were but the harmonious accompaniment of a stupendous national anxiety. All these things Jingalo was told by its newspapers, and some of them were true; and in the reading and the doing of them how Jingalo enjoyed itself!
And so, by the inglorious device of anonymity and lavishness combined the King maintained his point, and sent his gift to the relief of one who was, as a matter of fact, just as legally a widow as any other you or I may like to name. John of Jingalo had not yet broken the official leading-strings, but on this occasion he had circumvented them.
The Archbishop was deeply shocked as well as nonplussed at such an answer coming from his daughter; and meanwhile with clear sincerity of speech she went on "You mean the Church of Jingalo do you not, papa?" Of course it was the Church of Jingalo that he meant, but it would not do at this juncture to say so.
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