PART II (continued 5)

“In that case I should not care to be the Emperor,” remarked the Princess Sarolta.

Ranata suddenly lifted her hand. “I hear such a peculiar noise,” she said. “Is a storm rising?”

The rest became aware of a deep low murmur, not unlike the rolling in of tides. Zrinyi left the table hastily and looked from one of the narrow windows at the upper end of the hall.

“I will send for your cloaks,” he said, “and then I shall ask you to step out on the platform for a moment.”

A few minutes later he threw open the great doors of the hall, and the party stared silently at the scene before them. The full moon swung close to the ice-fields, the white harsh peaks high above. In the court-yard, on the small plain beyond, on every snowy hill and rock, were crowded hundreds of men clad in the skins of the sheep, the wolf, the goat, and the bear. On their heads were high fur hats, which exposed but a fringe of long hair on their shoulders and concealed their brows, giving them an aspect of singular wildness. But they were very quiet, almost breathless, until Zrinyi stepped forward and shouted something in Roumanian. Then each man lifted a flute to his lips, and a sweet and savage melody stole forth gently, to rise and swell until all the vast and desolate scene seemed to bend and listen. The notes might have been born of the peaks that looked as if torn asunder by harsh unlovely hands, then softened to beauty and gentleness by the silver glitter of the snow. And the strains, piercing yet remote, had in them too the eternal loneliness of the mountains, the only thing in Nature akin to the eternal loneliness of the great. The hills took up the echo and rolled it on, and among far and hidden peaks a laugh seemed flying from itself.

When they had finished, Zrinyi turned to Ranata. “They have come here to see your Royal Highness,” he said; “and not so much because you are our princess as the sister of our lost crown prince. Have I your permission to ask them to enter?”

Ranata, who was pale, turned paler. “Yes,” she said. “Ask them in.”

The guests returned to the lower end of the hall, whence the table had been removed, and threw off their cloaks. The women made a brilliant group in their elaborate dinner dress, their flowers and jewels and superfluous fans.

The Wallachians and Roumanians—there are few of Hungarian blood so far south in Transylvania—came silently but eagerly in. Each man as he entered removed the tower of fur on his head, revealing a dark mane of matted hair. The countenances thus exposed were mild and often handsome, but the dark eyes burned and flashed with an excitement of which they gave no other evidence.

Ranata remained with the group until the incoming throng had almost filled the hall. The doors were still open, and behind the mass of heads on the platform she could see the snowy slopes of the range, whose silences seemed to have fallen upon the castle; no one spoke, and the sandals of the mountaineers pressed the floor silently. Zrinyi murmured a suggestion, and Ranata ascended a few steps of the staircase which finished the hall. All the voluptuous beauty had left her face; it was so white that her eyes burned black. Her aspect would have been angry had it been less stern. She could not speak Roumanian, but Zrinyi had hastily taught her a few words.

“I am the sister of your crown prince,” she said. “And I am honored and happy that you have come to see me.”

They gazed at her for a few moments in a heavier silence. To them she had lost nothing of a beauty they had never seen, and in the wavering lights, possibly because at the moment her mind was face to face with her brother, her likeness to Rudolf was so strong as to send the blood to their heads. It rose slowly, for they were cold with long waiting and taken by surprise with a beauty they had not expected, but when they realized that the sister of their prince and the chiefest object of his affections stood before them, they suddenly sent forth a mighty cry, hard, wild, abrupt. It was almost a note of agony, such as the mountains might have given when the fires of the earth boiled them apart. The cry shot out again, but this time it swelled into volume, ended in a roar, and then split into intelligible sound. “Élyen!” “Setreasca!” “Setreasca!” shook the old flags like the wind of battle; then, on a higher note, “Rudolf!” “Rudolf!” “Rudolf!” They came forward like a great wave, excited, voluble, demanding to be told what they had done to anger their prince that he came no more, what his wicked enemies had done with him, why his father, the great King and Emperor, was hiding him. It was idle to attempt to answer, and Ranata stood looking down upon them, at times forgetting the strange scene, her thoughts in the crypt of the Capuchin Church with her brother. Suddenly she heard herself addressed in Hungarian, and glanced aside to see a gypsy standing on the step below her. He was regarding her with admiring eyes, but there was a sardonic twinkle in them, and his mien although friendly would not have inspired confidence in an idiot. However, Ranata came forth from her thoughts and smiled on him.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

He addressed her in the most extravagant forms of homage, but when he answered her question it was with directness enough.

“I was with his party on every visit,” he asserted triumphantly, as if exhibiting a valued stock-in-trade; “I and my band. He was always eager to hear the Chardash. And out on Lake Zenoga, sometimes at Görgény, we sat at his board, or in the circle by the fire. Oh, those were the days, your Highness—first a prince, then a gypsy, then a prince, then a gypsy, all mixed up, all drunk, everybody happy. I know that Rudolf is dead, for I have travelled far, but I wish he were not.”

The man’s speech broke through the severity of her mood and she laughed. “I have no doubt they were gay times,” she said, “and I regret that I am not a man to come and take his place among you. But I will do the best I can; and believe that I shall love you as much as he did.”

The man shook his head. “We would never dare to love like that again.” He paused, then added meaningly, “The love of the chosen Hapsburgs is fatal—to themselves and to those who win it.”

Ranata looked over the man’s head as if he had disappeared into the still shouting multitude; but he had the assurance of his race, which acknowledges neither country nor king, and he repeated:

“It is always fatal, your Royal Highness.”

Then Ranata looked down at him once more. After all, the creature was not worth crushing, and he was diverting. Moreover, he had known and doubtless been spoiled by her brother. Rudolf had told her many anecdotes of the gypsies who always attached themselves to his Transylvanian household.

“You will not return to us!” continued the gypsy. “When Rudolf left us the last time I said he would not return. Nor did I predict it because he said to us not ‘Aufwiedersehen,’ but ‘Good-bye.’”

“Is that true?”

“It is true, but that was not the reason. When he came that last time I said he would not return.”

“And how do you know I shall not return?”

“Because love is fatal to the chosen Hapsburgs, your Royal Highness.”

“Then they can avoid love,” said the Archduchess impersonally.

“Not when they are made for it. Nature has protected many by a mask as ugly as the plague. When she gives them beauty be sure it is to scourge the proudest house on earth, and to chastise it for centuries of cruelty and oppression.”

“Maria Theresia was beautiful.”

“She was fat. She also had more children than a man ever can remember. Besides, she was not really beautiful.”

“And you are not very logical. Other houses of Europe have records for injustice as great as ours may possibly have.”

“Nature has taken other methods to punish them. Be sure that none shall escape.”

“I suppose you wish to tell my fortune. I have not superstition enough for that, but in the name of my brother I will send you a purse to the servants’ quarters to-night.”

She withdrew into the polite silence with which royalty lays down the burden of audience, but the gypsy held his ground. He thanked her extravagantly, and added: “I am more honest than most gypsies, your Royal Highness—I do not pretend to see too far into the future. But when a man’s heart is black with remorse and bitterness and hatred of life and the reckless indulgence of passions, I can see the end; and when a woman—”

“Go!” said Ranata; and this time the man mingled his featureless sheepskin with the others. She beckoned to Zrinyi and spoke with him a moment. Then he stood beside her and lifted his hand. Every man seemed to shut his voice between his teeth.

“Her Royal Highness wishes me to tell you,” said the Count, on a note which carried to those beyond the door, “that Rudolf is dead. That he has gone where you may meet him again if you are faithful and loyal subjects to the throne. She will tell you herself.”

And Ranata said in Roumanian, and with the cold accent of finality, “He is dead.”

Zrinyi let the words sink into the silence, then he raised his voice again and shouted that barrels of wine were opening in the kitchen, and the great wave turned upon itself and rolled out, but still in silence and with many a backward glance.

Ranata ascended the stairs. When she returned she wore a short skirt and a long fur cloak with a hood.

“I am going for a walk,” she said to the astonished company. “Mr. Abbott, will you come with me?” Then to the Princess Sarolta, who had risen, she added, “No power can prevent me. But do not be alarmed; I shall return.”

“Do you give me your royal word for that?” asked the alarmed Obersthofmeisterin, “otherwise, old and lame as I am, I shall follow you.”

“I give you my word. You may sleep in peace.”

XXVI

Fessenden and Ranata walked rapidly and in silence over the paths the mountain peasants had trodden that night. There had been neither wind nor snow for many days, and what had fallen was compact and not too smooth for impatient feet. For a time the path was straight, and, looking back, the irregular mass of the castle on its isolated rock was the one dark object in the white radiance of the Alpine world. Soon, however, a sharp turn about the foot of one of the peaks that rose straight from the brief level seemed to fling them abruptly into an eternity of ice-fields and endless chains of glittering crests so high above that their fierce teeth must surely bite new pictures into the moon that hung so close. Ranata’s arm was within his, but Fessenden’s mind reverted to his boyhood in the Adirondacks, when he had stolen forth to his balcony on winter moonlight nights to gaze upon the snowy lake and peaks, and dream of their kin in the far-off Alps. How tame that picture seemed to-night, dear as it was! That was a mild and pleasant wilderness compared with this upper firmament of ice and desolation, with its black forests below and on high its masses of rock and crag that looked as if arrested in brutal warfare with each other.

In the course of an hour the path came abruptly to an end on the shore of a small lake, from three sides of which the mountains rose like the straight and jealous sides of a mighty jewel casket guarding the diamond treasure of some old god of the hills. The lake, looking smaller perhaps from the great height of the perpendicular mountains surrounding it, was oval in shape, and its frozen surface glittered and sparkled under the moon poised directly above. No light of man had ever drawn such radiance from the diamond. The air was so still that the cold was hardly noticeable. The silence was intense, oppressive, now that their feet no longer met the snow crisply. Ranata put her hand nervously to her head.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of my boyhood in the Adirondacks. To-night a thousand years seem to have disappeared since then. And many and wild as were my dreams of the future in those callow days when I had leisure for dreams, no flight penetrated to the future which held these last weeks, to the indescribable solitude of this night with you. In those days I fancied myself a poor boy who had begun life in the orthodox log-cabin and must end in the White House. But that I should love a daughter of the Cæsars and hold her in my arms among the eternal snows of the loneliest of the Alps never muttered in my most exalted moments. Life is a rum thing.”

Ranata laughed in spite of the chaotic emotions that had driven her forth. “Which do you really love best, I wonder, the sublime or the ridiculous? Do you know what I had almost made up my mind to do when I came down to dinner?”

“To go to-morrow with me to Fiume?”

“To-night; as soon as the others were out of the way, and Zrinyi could have the horses harnessed. After I left you there was an hour in which I think I really was mad. Every fact of existence except the possibility of being alone with you on your yacht seemed to have been burned out of my mind. I would have sold Austria to William, I would have flung Hungary to Roumania—there was no crime I would not have committed to have been alone on this earth with you. And now we are alone, and the fever is gone. I look back upon the hours before those poor creatures came and shouted Rudolf’s name as upon some half-remembered interval of insanity. But it was appallingly real then, and if it came once it may come again. After our return to Budapest—and I shall start to-morrow—I shall never see you again.”

“I still think you are unwise not to take advantage of this opportunity. You will regret it; take my word for that.”

“Doubtless, when it is happily too late. I am ice now. I can only describe my sensation while those wild men were begging me for Rudolf by asking you to imagine yourself standing under that frozen cascade over there. It seemed to me that for the first time I realized the enormity of his crime. He could have been a great monarch, he could have preserved his country, he could have saved Europe from unimaginable horrors; and every gift, every duty, every ambition disappeared into the flaming abyss of his passions. Oh, if my father could only have died twenty years ago! That alone could have saved Rudolf, for it was excess that killed him; the occasional indulgence would not have mattered. And these men, and thousands like them, would have obeyed his lightest call to save Austria from Europe, to save it from Hungary if need be. They would come at my call. They would laugh even at my father. And, Fessenden, above those wild heads, and bodies like mountain beasts, I saw for a moment the pale face of Rudolf, terrible with agony and remorse, with impotent resentment against the law of the grave, dumbly beseeching me to continue the work that the great invisible forces up there had sent him into the world to accomplish. It was then that my blood turned to ice. An hour before—and in other moments, perhaps—I had been capable of greater guilt than Rudolf’s; for after all I have had no such temptations, no such provocations as his. Where you have upheld me, women, from the time he was old enough, the very girls of the court, flung themselves beneath his feet, honored to be dishonored by the heir to the throne, even had he been less fascinating as a man. My father had made no secret of his own amours; there has been no more corrupt court in Europe; Rudolf saw no necessity for restraint, and he used none. If he had married happily all might have been well, for he was not vicious, and his nature was very affectionate. But when does royalty marry happily? Fortunate the prince who marries the cow. Then at least there is one incentive the less. Rudolf had no such fortune, and disappointment and ennui, multiplying themselves, drove him to the arms of charming women who wished for nothing so much as to make him forget, and from them to the boon companions who adored him, but dared not remonstrate had they wished, when he drank till morning. But what excuse had I? Only that of a passion so great and so real that it should give me the strength of these mountains. Without it, after gaining my wishes in Hungary, I might have become bored, indifferent, cynical; I might even, as I felt youth passing, have indulged in amours that no one would dare to take me to account for. I might have gone to my coffin there in the Kaisergruft without an ideal in my soul, disillusioned, all my original nature in ruins, reviling life, glad to die. Now it seems to me that after the inevitable agony is over, I have it in me to become really great in character, sustained by an inner life and fed by a memory that will keep me young till my death. I thought of this long ago, when I met you first, but it passed from my mind. It was more like a dream then. I know it to be a reality now. I doubt if there can be any such actual happiness as what I shall find in the memories of you.”

Fessenden looked at her long and intently. If she was of many and variable moods, the moods were of an intensity and truth which submerged the other women in her while they lasted. And he always responded to her deeper moments so fully and so involuntarily that only his ever-alert brain saved him from compromising his future conduct. As in the profoundest solitude he had ever known, he looked through her eyes into her naked soul, he had a long moment of doubt. In that cold ideal of fulfilled duty, with her love apotheosized and spiritualized, might she not in truth be happier than he could make her? Her state, and the more commonplace cause of the deep chill of an Alpine midnight, had cooled his own blood, and muffled the passionate voices in his imagination. For a moment he too felt the white intoxication of the ideal of a lifetime of self-immolation on the passionless shores of duty, forecasted the serenity with which Nature rewards perpetual striving after spiritual heights, and compensates for the voluntary resignation of the joy of love. He darted a glance upward and was visited by a brief illusion: he and Ranata stood alone on the highest peak that pierced the stars. Then like Life he compromised.

“I wish for nothing less than your full and unconditional surrender,” he said. “If, when you have had time to know yourself better than you do now, you tell me that your decision is unalterable, I will persist no further. I believe that you will send for me before long, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps I have been blinded by my love, and the hopes with which it has inspired my imagination. There may be, there are, of course, depths in your mind of which I have no conception. These may contain forces that will finally shut me out of your life. If you convince me that I should add to your unhappiness by persisting, or that I should do you a great wrong by making you mine in spite of yourself, then I promise you here solemnly to withdraw finally from your life; and to be as eternally faithful to you as I believe you will be to me.”

Vilma from her high window saw them return. She had watched for them, not from the motive which had made her neighbor walk restlessly between her window and her writing-table, but in tempestuous sympathy with a romance against which she pressed so close. Her own heart she believed to be a graveyard with one tomb, and she found a vicarious happiness in this atmosphere of passionate and uncommon love that she was graciously permitted to enter. She had seen how it was from the first, and had done what she could to divert the attentions and the suspicion of Piroska. Pumping had had no effect on the wary Zápolya, and Vilma, with all her subtlety, was still in doubt as to what the possible enemy may have seen or suspected. She had followed Fessenden and Ranata on the night of the ball, and waited without the door leading to the private apartments until she heard him returning; that she might be able to assure Piroska she had been their companion and chaperon. But Piroska had given no sign that she had been occupied during that brilliant night except with her many partners, and Vilma dared not tell Ranata what she had done. Gracious and captivating as the Princess was in her new rôle, it would have been a braver than Vilma who would have taken a liberty with her. Fessenden possessed no great charm for this young Hungarian, who preferred a more romantic type, but if he had inspired love in her beautiful princess she wished with all her heart that he too were of the blood of kings. Had these two been content with intrigue she would willingly have helped and shielded them, but she shrewdly suspected the truth. Astounding as the fact might be, the American wished to marry the daughter of an emperor and king. It took the ancient pattern of her brain a long while to adjust itself to the bare idea, but when time had accustomed her to its audacity she could, starved soul that she was, but sympathize. She too had had an intuition of Ranata’s state of mind when she bloomed upon them at dinner that night, breathing passion and defiance, and she heartily wished the Princess had slipped out of the castle with her lover instead of giving her word to the Obersthofmeisterin to return.

She had also overheard the words of Piroska to the American, and she had noted that the moment the Princess left the castle the sister lady-in-waiting had pleaded the morning toothache and gone to her room. It adjoined Vilma’s, and for two hours the friend had listened to the steady scratching of the enemy’s pen, interrupted only by hasty visits to the window. Vilma had lived close enough to Piroska during these months of court life to be sure she did not keep a diary. She was now fully convinced that she was the tool of Königsegg for two reasons: it was worth her while, and she had intended to marry the American when he became convinced of the hopelessness of his suit. Piroska’s wiles had been patent enough if her hostility had not, and to-night, as the American had turned to her with an air of conclusion and six words which might have extinguished hope in a more sanguine heart, the hard little face of Piroska had settled into lines of malice and determination. She had been as gay as usual during the dinner, but the color had come back neither to cheek nor lips, and Vilma suspected that if the unfortunate lovers had flown that night Piroska would have managed to follow them as far as the first telegraph station. Now, no doubt, she was writing her long-deferred report.

As Vilma watched Ranata and Fessenden return, she slipped from the window-seat and climbed onto the bed, still huddled in her furs. The fire was out and the room almost cold, but she could not prepare for sleep knowing of the plot thickening in the next room. The hour had come to act, but what should she do? To attempt to intercept Piroska’s letter on the morrow would be futile; Piroska would see to that. Vilma did her justice; there would be no loose ends, as in novels, for the good fairy to unravel. Should she walk boldly in and hurl suspicion in her face? Vilma was too European to approve of the crude method. The wild idea occurred to her of smothering Piroska with a pillow as she slept, but she had a certain measure of common-sense; a tragedy in the royal household would put an end to court life in Buda for the present, perhaps thwart ambitions she half suspected, possibly send herself to keep company with Piroska. She dismissed with some reluctance the idea she was quite capable of executing, and suddenly determined to go into Piroska’s room and be guided by events. She left the bed and knocked on the connecting door; then, assuming that she had been answered, opened it and entered.

“I cannot sleep,” she said, “and I heard you moving about, so I thought you might be as glad of company as I. You are writing? How can you in this cold? Do you know I sat up to watch them come home? Not that I doubted they would, but I felt as if I were living in a chapter of romantic memoirs. I may write mine some day—but you should do that—you are so much cleverer than I.”

Piroska had risen politely and pushed a chair slightly away from her table. She had a small pile of manuscript before her, which she had the presence of mind not to attempt to conceal. “I am cold,” she said, stifling a yawn, “and tired. But I could not go to bed. The excitement of the evening made me hopelessly wide awake, so I thought I would write my long-neglected letters.”

“It has been exciting—those wild simple creatures! But that looks like a book. Tell me—” her eyes were bright with girlish curiosity, “are you writing a novel? You could! Ah! I know you are!”

“Well,” said Piroska, with a delicate hesitation, “I—for Heaven’s sake don’t breathe it, Vilma! One is such a fool until one succeeds!”

Vilma gave an ecstatic cry, and with a movement as swift and unexpected as that of a panther flung herself upon the mass of papers. “Let me see! Let me see!” she cried. But they were torn from her hands and the eyes that met hers blazed with the ferocity of a less civilized century.

“You dare!” gasped Piroska—“you dare!”

Vilma had seen enough. “Oh, very well,” she said haughtily. “I had no idea a book was like a tiger’s cub. It made me quite wild with curiosity, and I am sorry we tore the manuscript. Good-night. I would not sit up and copy it if I were you. Your tooth will be quite frightful to-morrow.”

She swept out, and locked the door as she closed it. Piroska, too, might be capable of using a pillow. She took down a candlestick and let herself noiselessly into the hall. It was very dark, except for the patches of ghostly moonlight; but commonplace fears were unknown to this girl of fighting ancestors, of women who had suffered worse than death. She knew that the men’s rooms were in the opposite wing, and she traversed the long corridors between without adventure or qualm. When she reached the wing she saw light under two doors; Zrinyi had undoubtedly sat up to await the return of the Princess. Which was the American’s door she had no means of knowing, but she did not hesitate. If her knock summoned Zrinyi she would tell him that she had a message for his guest which must be delivered then. It brought Fessenden, however, and she stepped quickly into his room and closed the door.

He did not look as astonished as she had expected, but she told her story breathlessly and begged him to act at once.

“It will do no good to intercept the report,” she added. “Even if you could, she would merely write another. But let me go to the Princess and beg her to fly with you to-morrow early. We could shut Piroska up for twenty-four hours. If you do not take this opportunity you will never have another. Her Royal Highness must have many enemies at court. This will be the final straw. If she is forced to return to Vienna you will never see her again.”

“I wish that report to go to Vienna to-morrow,” said Fessenden, “and if you are not too tired to sit down for a few moments, I will tell you how you can help when she is once more in the Hofburg.”

XXVII

Two nights after her return Ranata went to the opera-house of Budapest for the last time. Much to her chagrin she was ten minutes late. Royalty has its privileges and virtues. It may exercise the courtesy of promptness without loss of prestige, and no men and women the world over sit in an opera-box with the same ease and dignity and grace. From childhood they are trained to stand and sit without moving or betraying fatigue, and if the frequent necessity adds to the sum of their mortal expiations, it makes them as decorative, when properly dressed, as their ancient palaces and historical pageants.

But for one princess the tenor of the day had been disturbed. A sleepless night had resulted in an involuntary nap at three o’clock in the afternoon. Her drive had been late, and she had returned home so short a time before the early dinner that her maids had detained her through half of it. She regretted having announced her intention to attend the opera, but it was a première, and she would have been expected in any case.

The large house was crowded with the gay aristocracy of Budapest, and with many who, if not so highly placed, could dress as well, and contribute to the general effect of brilliant beauty: an effect which owed more than the women would have admitted to the varied and magnificent uniforms of the officers. Orders glittered on black coats as on colored, and every woman wore her abundant store of jewels. But fans and heads were moving restlessly. Where was their princess? It was the première in Hungary of Massenet’s “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” and this music-loving people were eager for the curtain to rise.

At ten minutes past seven that mysterious electric current that announces the coming of royalty to the sensitive faculties of Europeans flew over the house; bringing it to its feet, and lifting its eyes to the gala box facing the stage, as if manipulated by a spring.

Ranata, accompanied by Sarolta and Alexandra, her Grand Chamberlain, Prince Illehazy, and Count Zrinyi, entered and advanced to the front of the box, acknowledging the waving of handkerchiefs and clapping of hands, the well-bred “Élyens” and “Vivats” and “Hochs.” She wore white velvet, a small crown of pearls, and many pearls on her neck. For the first time she showed the wear of too much thought and loss of sleep; she was pale rather than white, and her eyes were listless. During the few moments that she stood there, however, while the band played the national anthem, her guests on either side of her, the admiring house saw only the perfect carriage of her form and head, the undimmed brilliancy of her hair, and that most rare combination of beauty and majesty.

The anthem finished, the royal party took their seats, the opera began. Ranata kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the stage, but although she felt and had been severely drilled in music, hers was the imagination which escapes control under the influence of the only art that penetrates to the key-notes of being. The spell of the limpid semi-religious music swirled round her like a soft tide. She saw far beyond the poor juggler apologizing to the Virgin for desecrating her name that he might gratify a heartless rabble and keep his wretched body from starving; and if she forbade her eyes to wander over the house, every nerve told her that Fessenden Abbott was not there.

She had asked him to leave Hungary immediately upon his return to Budapest, and she knew that if he had not done so—he must await important telegrams—he would not come to the palace, nor to any gathering where she was sure to be. And to attend the opera except in her train would have excited the comment both wished to avoid.

Whether he had gone or not she did not know, for she would not ask Alexandra; if indeed her friend knew, for the brother and sister had said good-bye at the station in Budapest. Ranata, who had been gifted with no greater measure of consistency than the rest of her sex, had hoped to see him while driving, while entering the opera-house, to receive from him some swift involuntary token that he was thinking of her as persistently as she was of him.

For she thought of little else, and she was aghast at the power of love to defy the will. The emotional struggle had induced a physical lassitude she had never known before. That morning she had risen with the thought, “Am I going to send for him to-day? Am I? Am I?” And the question had risen again and again, acquainting her for the first time with the insolent defiance of the fixed idea to the higher qualities of the brain. She had had experience of the dual entity in the mental household before, but never so complete a sense of division, nor of possession by faculties which seemed to have forced an entrance into her mind rather than have risen from its depths.

She had not sent for him, however, and she hardly knew whether she had refrained through the exercise of a will which appeared to sit in a corner smiling with amusement, from pride, a sense of futility, or merely because the argument in her mind had not finished in time. In any case she felt so far from her imperious self that she was almost as alarmed as she was unhappy. She was filled with a dull abhorrence of the idea of living the rest of her life on the surface of her nature, as she was attempting to live it to-night. For what else was left her? Did she become queen, and none knew better than she that it was but a possibility among a thousand opposing forces, she could occupy her brain with routine as her father did; but in a constitutional monarchy, particularly in one as jealous of its rights as Hungary, she would exercise so little power that, with her merciless clarity of vision, she must soon know herself for what she was, an ornamental figure-head. It would be the pride of the Hungarians to have the most beautiful queen in Europe, delight the abundant enthusiasm and the loyal instinct of their natures to love their elected sovereign; and they would value her the more for a charm which must unite all factions and preserve them from internal conflict. They would vote her immense sums to live as a queen should, to restore to the old palace of Buda its ancient glories and excite the envy of Europe. All these things she might have, and she knew them to be toys.

Did she sympathize with the tide of liberty rising in the world, and nowhere so vigorously as in Hungary? She had put the question from her again and again, and it had returned as often. Surely he had not revolutionized her brain to that extent; she must be less than herself were she unfaithful to the monarchical idea. And yet, when her mind left Fessenden Abbott it seemed to her that some mysterious force drew it to the great sullen heart of mankind, brooding eternally on its birthright of freedom; every instinct of independence, when not crushed by the tyranny of the Turk or the Russian, still blunted and pruned in a thousand petty and humiliating ways. Would the socialists conquer William? And then—when with greater liberty had come their own adaptation to the unalterable facts of life and human nature—would the world be better, a more habitable place for mankind in the general? And was that the destiny of the human race—the happiness of the many, not the exaltation of the few? That it was a great thought, a grand theory, she did not pretend to deny. But did she sympathize with it?

While she assured herself contemptuously that she did not, that the order of the centuries must be best merely because it was, a part of her brain seemed to her to accept the doctrine, and give itself no concern to argue. She turned her back upon it. Why argue, indeed? A month, a few months hence, possibly a year, the influence that now possessed her would be so far removed that her mind would have recovered its balance, alien thoughts must have sunk so deep that she would only unearth them now and again as curiosities. She made up her mind that if Alexandra did not marry Zrinyi she would put an end to the intimacy with herself; and it seemed to her, in her present unhappy condition, that she would be insensible to further sorrow. She should indeed welcome complete loneliness, barren of outward suggestion. There could be no doubt of the triumph, in time, of her strong will, of her absolute fidelity, in thought as in deed, to the lofty station to which she had been born.

She sighed for her lost superstitions, rather for the superstitions of her fathers which might have been here had no alien influence entered her life. How they must sustain the soul of majesty through its trials, through its loneliness, through the long martyrdom of its earthly course. There had been times when she had heard the deep mutter of those ancient ghosts, when for a brief hour they had risen and possessed her brain. Indeed, there had been hours—usually when Alexandra’s uncompromising practicality summered in its native land—when it had seemed to her that in the depths of her soul was a charnel-house of hideous memories, ambiguous of outline, of old corruptions, unknown in her life but transmitted with her blood, of impulses for tyranny and cruelty, and unbridled passions, of lust of blood, and callous indifference to human suffering. Philip the Second and Joan the Mad were but two of her illustrious ancestors who might have sent filtering down the worst traits and impulses which the human heart is capable of supporting. There had been times when she had believed that had she been born a century earlier it would have needed but the circumstances to make her the vilest of women. She could have reigned with her feet in blood and loved as royal harlots have loved since Messalina burned her pitch in history. And, she recalled, as she listened to the soft passionless music of the opera, there had also been moments when she had regretted that no such life could be hers—wondered if indeed it had not been.

But it was years now since the last of these obsessions had risen, five or six, at least. She had acquired great control over herself; moreover, they had rested impotent under healthy influences; and assuredly in the company of Fessenden Abbott she could not have evoked their memory, the ghosts of those old ghosts. Would it not perhaps be better if she could? Would not even the occasional demoralization of her spiritual nature be a lesser sin than this treachery to the divinity in her royal blood? Were she steeped in superstition she might have known her lover better than she had; but the temptation to marry him, the persistent disposition to look at life from his point of view, would never have assailed her for a moment.

Her eyes during this long reverie, interrupted only by an entr’acte, were fixed upon the stage. The surface of her brain had taken its impression of the interior of the monastery where the starving mountebank, cursed by the prior for his blasphemy, had been enticed that he might find absolution in the life of a monk and fill his stomach daily. The priests and friars in their rich white cassocks, the brown interior of the monastic room, made a harmonious and insidious picture, and the despair of the miserable youth while the other cenobites boasted of the arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, music—with which they glorified the Virgin, drew tears from many sympathetic eyes.

The juggler and a kindly friar were alone, and the elect was pouring into the astonished ear of the poor ignoramus the story of the birth of Christ in a manger, and explaining that the Lady of Sorrows understood not only Latin, but all languages, and even dialects, and had as merciful an ear for the outcast as for the king. The mountebank, with his primitive credulity, his almost maniacal terror under the curse of the abbot, is a vivid study of superstition in the Middle Ages. As Ranata’s attention was captured for the moment by the intensity of the final moments of the act, she found herself envying the simplicity of a creature as capable, in his primal limitations, of the extremest satisfaction and happiness as of terror and despair. The second entr’acte is very short. A few moments after the curtain rises the impressive double row of friars in their sumptuous cassocks march out of the chapel to their own solemn music, and the mountebank enters alone, throws off his monastic robe, and in his costume of a harlequin offers his juggler’s art to the glorification of the painted Virgin above the altar. It is a scene almost incredible in its childish superstition, but so pathetic that in that rapt audience neither Jew nor Protestant paid his brain the tribute of a smile. Ranata, of all persons, saw no humor in it, for her mind traversed the history of her race, and halted suddenly at the memory of Maria Theresia, who had sent her daughters down alone into the imperial crypt on the eve of their marriage to pray among the coffins of their ancestors. She recalled how she herself had sometimes felt an impulse to go down there in the night and do likewise, that she might satisfy that something in the depths of her soul so akin to those who had dwelt in the benighted past.

Her attitude suddenly lost its graceful ease. She stiffened and sat erect as if about to spring; but the eye of the house was focussed on the stage and she was forgotten. Was not the time come for that nocturnal pilgrimage? Might not she there, among those four centuries of her dead, steep herself in that subtle aura of personality which still must diffuse itself through lead and bronze? Alone there, at midnight, with but the light of a taper to illumine those motley hillocks, with the dank odor of death clogging her senses, kneeling close to the dust and the corruption which had lived so intensely with the blood that ran in her own veins, must she not recapture her inherited superstitions, break with the present, absorb once more the poison of the past? She realized that it was not to satisfy her sense of kinship with the dead that she should now go to them alone at midnight, but to revive the lost sense of indissoluble relationship, of similarities, of the closest likeness of which inherited blood and brain-cells are capable. She should kneel finally at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin, and pray there until she was a Hapsburg once more.

Heavy and abnormal as her brain was from fatigue, sleeplessness, passionate misery of thought, and reaction from the exalted mood of her last interview with Fessenden, still it seemed to her that it drew away in modern disgust from the idea that had risen precipitately in its middle and taken possession. But Ranata clung to that idea as to her one hope of salvation; and as the Virgin and the angels, which had appeared in place of the picture above the altar, to reveal the eternal beauty of simple faith to the indignant priests, were growing more luminous, and at the same time, so perfect the art, less and less material, and the poor juggler’s spirit was struggling from its flesh, she matured the details of her plan; and half an hour later, when she descended from the carriage in the palace court-yard, she asked Sarolta to be ready to accompany her to Vienna on the following day.

XXVIII

Fessenden had found his telegrams awaiting him, and started at once for Berlin. While the ghosts in Ranata were chuckling their recognition to the painted superstitions of the stage, he was in the royal palace, in the comfortable English-looking study overlooking the Schlossplatz. On the north corner of the huge brown pile floated the purple banner which informs the people of Berlin that their “Travelling Kaiser” is visiting at home.

The Emperor was pleasurably at home this evening, for, although he was too much of a soldier to lounge, he wore a smoking-jacket and sat deep in one of his English chairs; the color of animation was in his pale face, and his eyes, always expressive and brilliant, sparkled with a more personal emotion.

It was night. His courtiers, his ministers, his generals, his supplicants, were on the other side of the door, and he could be wholly himself for an hour with the one man who neither feared nor flattered him, to whom he had given a large portion of his own warm affections, and who, in return, gave him the sincerest friendship he would ever know.

Fessenden’s chair was drawn close to the fire, and he was sipping a Scotch-and-soda. It was a night for a comfortable talk in a warm bright room, surrounded by books and a man’s more intimate belongings; for the wind howled about the corner of the palace and dashed the rain against the glass. Fessenden’s eyes were sparkling also, but with excitement, and he was more nervous than he usually permitted his manner to betray.

“Within a week,” the Emperor was saying, “the Archduchess will be summoned to Vienna on one pretence or another. The plan is to make her a prisoner in her own rooms until she promises to marry the Archduke Aloys Franz. I suggested him on account of his commanding qualities as a disciplinarian; you will recall that they married the Princess Marie Stefanie to him when her liaison with her tenor was discovered. He imprisoned her on one of his estates, never permitted her to leave it for a day, and when she lost a front tooth mortified her vanity by refusing her the services of a dentist—she was a beauty, poor little thing! As a husband for refractory princesses he is without a peer; and my indirect suggestion met with instant favor from the Emperor, who is distracted between the jealousies of the court and the new motive for disturbance in the caldron of Hungary. The full information—furnished by the maid of honor and other spies—of her love for you was the last straw; and much as the Emperor loves peace and quiet, when the moment comes to act he acts. The Archduchess, of course, will not marry Aloys Franz. We know her; elaboration of that statement is superfluous. But several weeks of solitary meditation will probably convince her that, as her ambitions are thwarted, she may as well marry you and be happy. Confinement will reduce her to an abnormal state, where love will seem the only object for living.”

He left his chair and moved restlessly about the room. “I don’t like it!” he announced in his harsh emphatic voice. “It is unheard of. It is a dangerous precedent. We shall have other dissatisfied and romantic princesses following her example. Take one stone out of the monarchical edifice and it is impossible to foresee the end. God knows, we are shaky enough now. I tell you frankly, Fessenden, that I should assist in no such revolution solely out of friendship for even you; but to get her out of Europe is the less of two evils. I have been called the trigger of Europe. She is the firebrand charged with dynamite. She was dangerous enough before. Now that she has fallen in love, the only thing to do is to marry her to the object as quickly as possible. Balked, and thrown in upon herself, she would set Europe in flames merely to distract her mind and gratify some other passion.” He swung round abruptly and laughed. “I must say, Fessenden, that while I am delighted to be able to help you get the woman you want, I don’t envy you. I shouldn’t say she was the sort of woman a man could settle down and have a comfortable time with.”

“I want nothing more nor less,” said Fessenden; and the Emperor laughed again, although his generous nature was gratified at the opportunity to be of service to his friend.

“It will be rather more than less,” he said. “I have known her since childhood, and while I admire her more in certain respects than any woman living, I am not precisely blind to her faults. I will confess that I shook her once, a good many years ago, when I was visiting Rudolf, and that she bit and scratched me in return. However, the one man can always manage the woman of strong passions, so I wish you joy.”

“Thanks; and don’t let my domestic prospects worry you. Are you perfectly sure of your man, by the way?”

“Oh, perfectly. He has the ear of the Emperor and the Crown Prince, and, while by no means false to them, is so good a friend of mine that he would do more than that if I asked it of him. Moreover, he has the confidence of Königsegg.”

“Suppose they should suspect that you put him up to it? That would ruin everything. They are quite as afraid of you as they are of her.”

“No diplomat in Europe is more discreet—or finer in his methods. He has dropped the poison by degrees. His first references to the astonishing popularity of the Archduchess in Hungary were almost inadvertent, and at the same time accompanied with enthusiastic comments upon her talents. Her conquest of the Independents was the last straw. The Emperor has been convinced that they would proclaim her queen the moment he died. Was it your suggestion that they met her in a body at the train when she arrived from Transylvania?”

“I put Molnár and one or two others up to it, although they are quite convinced it was their own idea.”

“I am thankful you are my friend, for I shouldn’t want your finger in my political pie! Well, Ranata will never see Budapest after this week—if you are quick enough. If she should devil the poor old Emperor into his grave while he was trying to bring her to terms, I should not venture to answer for the consequences. What is your next move? I see no further. How shall you get her out of the Hofburg? Bribe the guards? It will be difficult. The Emperor will guard her well. She could hardly disguise herself and slip out. How shall you manage to communicate with her?”

“Do not exercise your imagination over possibilities of escape, for I have no idea of attempting any. I intend to marry her with the Emperor’s consent. Not very graciously given, perhaps, but still—”

“Oh, Fessenden!” The Emperor spoke impatiently. He had paused on the hearth-rug, and stood there with his left hand resting lightly on his hip, the familiar sword-hilt being absent, the right gesticulating slightly, with a constant movement of the wrist and an occasional pointing of the index finger. “That, my dear boy,” he added kindly, “is just the one thing that even you cannot accomplish. That you will get the Archduchess sooner or later I have no doubt. When a woman like that loves a man—” He shot his hand up expressively. “It may be that I shall have an inspiration of some sort and help you further, but I cannot act openly or I would invite her here. But I have every faith in your resource.”

“You will have more when I tell you my plan.”

The Emperor’s keen eyes met his, and they measured each other as they had a habit of doing.

“Well?” asked the Emperor of Germany.

Fessenden stood up and thrust his hands into pockets. His nervousness had gone, and his eyes were hard and brilliant. “What do you suppose the Emperor would give to restore the ancient strength and prestige of Austria?” he asked, in the cool and even tones he employed in his Wall Street offices. “To obliterate the memory of 1866? To finish his long and unhappy reign gloriously?”

“What on earth are you driving at? I never heard you talk at random before.”

“You have never heard me talk at random. What would he give in return for such a certainty?”

“More than Ranata. But I hate riddles!” His eyes flashed. The blood burned his cheek. He knew Fessenden, and was sure that he was not listening to bombast. His curiosity and impatience nearly choked him. “Come! Come!” he said. “What idea have you in your head? After South America I am prepared for anything. If you were not such a good fellow I should hate you—but go on.”

“Perhaps what all the world most wants next to the fulfilment of its personal desires,” continued Fessenden imperturbably, “is the obliteration of its most actively malignant forces. The most malignant force in the world to-day is Russia; in a lesser degree, Turkey. These countries, by their unredeemable barbarism, compass the utter misery of more millions of helpless human beings than all the other causes in the rest of the world that conduce, in the natural order of things, to unhappiness. Moreover, Russia is the one menace which prevents Europe and England from enjoying a moment’s security. She creeps and creeps, and never retraces a step. In far-sightedness Russia is the greatest genius among nations, and she is absolutely unscrupulous; the tyro in diplomacy does not trust her, and yet she outwits again and again. There is a hideous possibility of her eventual triumph, and the day she weakens the power of England, puts her nose in the Persian Gulf, flows over Turkey, that day sounds the passing bell of modern civilization. Therefore, the power or powers that hamstring this anomaly in the twentieth century, forcing her to crouch with her feet in the sand like a malignant but helpless sphinx until invading progress has taught her wisdom—these powers would achieve an immortality in history which they could compass by means of no other modern conditions. Am I not right?”

The Emperor nodded. He was very pale. Not only had Fessenden pricked from its drugged sleep one of the passionate hopes of his early manhood, but he knew that the American was no idle dreamer, that he had already accomplished the impossible. He had a sensation of standing spellbound on the threshold of a miraculous future towards which the great forces within him had moved precisely since the birth of the worlds. But the impression was hardly realized; his faculties were concentrated upon the utterance of the man who no longer looked young, in whose aspect was no trace of the lover of the Archduchess of Austria, who, indeed, looked little more than an intellect, using a casual body as a convenient medium. Abbott asked his next question so abruptly that the Emperor stiffened into an attitude not unlike that of a midnight sentry alarmed by a sudden footfall.

“You know what I have been trying to do in my factory out West?”

“Well?”

“The experiments are perfected. The kites—and they are as beautiful as they are deadly—can be sent by electricity to an incalculable distance, and each one will rain down dynamite enough to kill a thousand men at a time if they are close enough together. The generators to charge storage batteries have, by other experiments, been so reduced in size and weight that they hardly count among the effects of a travelling army. The enemy could be routed in ten minutes. Even balloons are not necessary, except for reconnoitring. You also know of the other invention, no less important. That is perfected. The steel forts are not only impregnable, but the secret has been discovered of moving electrically operated machines over any sort of ground. So far, moving forts, bicycles, automobiles have been useless except on good roads. These forts will travel without so much as a lowering of speed over the worst that nature has to offer; there is even an apparatus, on the principles of the flying-machine, which will carry them over swamps and rivers. Do you see my drift?”

The Emperor’s face would have looked like wax but for the severity of its lines. “Good God!” he muttered finally. “If this is true it will make you the master of the world.”

“It will make you the master of Europe.”

“What riddle now?” He spoke thickly, but involuntarily twitched his shoulders. He was quick to resent any attempt to manage him.

“The Spanish War has come and gone. I have no use for these new weapons of war. They must be used at once, for ideas are microbes. A few years hence—a year hence—and the discoveries may be universal. If I had never met Ranata I should have presented them to you and told you to go ahead, and in the name of humanity wipe Russia and Turkey, in the form they now exist, off the map. I want to see you at the helm while you are still young, and discouragements and disappointments have not crushed all the enthusiasm out of you. The world has waited and waited for you to do the great thing, not realizing your difficulties, and that it was your purpose to make Germany strong and prosperous before launching it into a great war; your crusade will be looked upon as quite in keeping with your character. And you are the only man on this side of the water capable of handling a great empire. So, I repeat, I should have offered you this new power in any case. Now I ask you to use it as a bait for the Emperor of Austria. Owing to your alliance it would be a natural act; unless you could afford to wait for his death, which you cannot. Tell him that if he refuses you will swallow him too. But he can hardly hesitate to snatch at the one compensation for the failures of his reign and life. Such of the conquered territory as you may have to yield to him will flow to you naturally at his death, for his heir could not hold it, and you may be sure that, as the initiator of so magnificent and beneficent a conquest, and as the younger and more picturesque of the majesties, you will be the idol of Austria-Hungary, as well as the hero of the world. France can be as easily disposed of as Russia, and indeed every intelligent power will let you alone after your first battle. Of course you can have all the money you want should you meet with opposition in the Reichstag. That offer has always stood. As for the excuse for war, it will be simple enough to whip up a disturbance in the Balkans. A few discreet agents, a revolutionary committee, surreptitious presents of arms, and Bulgaria or Macedonia is in flames. A secret understanding with Ferdinand and he will do anything to get Russia off his back. Then when the pot is boiling, and the so-called Christians are sprinkling their gore on their own unspeakable filth, announce to Christendom that Christian rulers can stand no more, impose impossible conditions on Russia, and sail in. There will be enough of these weapons of destruction ready before the end of three months to conquer the whole of Europe, and no more time is necessary to manipulate the Balkans.”

He paused abruptly, and again the two men stared hard and long at each other. The pallor and the burning eyes of both testified to the passionate emotion they controlled. Fessenden had permitted eagerness to creep neither into his tones nor manner, but he felt as if he were standing in the dock awaiting a sentence of life or death. The Emperor felt as if he had been whirled back to the first years of his reign, when all things seemed possible to a young and indomitable ruler. And that reign had been one long and desperate struggle between his autocratic instincts and the deep and persistent desire for the extreme rights of man among a large division of his subjects. He had given them much, but they wanted more; and being advised by flatterers, and so far removed from contact with the masses, he looked upon the greater part of their demands with angry impatience. But no ruler had ever brought a more lofty enthusiasm to reform, and he had been thwarted by ignorance, and conservative stupidity, and personal hatred, until he sometimes felt that the day might not be far distant when he should shrug his shoulders and simmer down into the routine of other sovereigns. It was true he had accomplished many things and he had made a great city of Berlin and a wealthy state of Prussia; but when he thought of his old ambitions he felt sick with the futility of life. Fessenden’s abrupt proposition had given him a moment of unutterable happiness, then almost paralyzed his faculties. He wondered if he should awake and find himself alone, still compelled to profess friendship for the enemy of civilization.

Fessenden continued. “Ranata, of course, will formally renounce all rights to the throne. But the Emperor’s consent I will have, if only as a concession of Europe to the United States—a formal recognition of her absolute equality among nations. I forgot to tell you that the details of these inventions have been so worked out that no one but my head electrician and myself knows them all, and the exact combinations. And he is not only a man of honor, but no crowned head in Europe could offer him a bribe comparable to what he will receive from me on the day of your first battle with Russia.”

The Emperor came out of his reverie. “Have you samples here?”

“They are in the custom-house. They have not been examined, and await your order to pass them through unopened. The electrician is also here. My father arrives to-morrow. We can have an object-lesson on Saturday.”

“Let us have it by all means,” said the Emperor of Germany.

XXIX

Vienna, the stately brown city, so haughty without, so simple within. Vienna, the city of beautiful men and women, of fastidious breeding and dispersing forces. Vienna, the gay, the wanton, the merciless. Vienna, the city of the dead soul; the great actress whose still perfect shell moves mechanically upon the stage, not knowing under what sudden stroke she may tremble and disappear. In no city on earth is life so full of charm and yet of unreality, no city where one feels so alive and yet so encompassed by dreams, where to the American New York is not, but a superlative civilization with the taint of the Middle Ages in its brain.

Ranata felt something of this luscious yet corrupt flavor of her native city as she drove from the station to the Hofburg; but vaguely, for her contrasts were few. Moreover, her father had met her, and was talking constantly and somewhat at random. If Ranata had not been preoccupied she would have noticed the evident embarrassment in his manner and his elaborate attempt at dissimulation. He was more affectionate than was his wont; a shade less of his perfect breeding and he would have appeared apologetic. But his daughter’s brain was heavy and absorbed by one idea. Sarolta was driving to her own palace, and Ranata was anxious to take advantage of these few moments with her father. Suddenly he gave her the opportunity she wished. He remarked in the tone of one whose masculine recesses have received a welcome illumination:

“I suppose, my dear, that you have come to Vienna to have a personal conference with your dressmakers.”

“No,” said Ranata, and it was notable that she did not smile; “I have come to ask a great favor of your Majesty, and I beg that you will predispose yourself to grant it.”

The Emperor stiffened, the natural act of a monarch whose life is passed with those that crave the royal favor. But the act to-day was more than mechanical; there were several portentous favors this extraordinary daughter of his might have nerved herself to ask—might indeed have deluded herself she was in a position to ask—and the very thought of them turned him to steel.

“Well?” he demanded.

“It is a singular request, sir, for it is for permission to revive an ancient custom of our house. I wish to go down into the crypt alone on this midnight and pray by the coffin of Rudolf.”

The Emperor drew a long breath of relief. There was nothing remarkable to him in the request, for he believed his daughter to be as devout a Catholic as himself. “How could a Hapsburg be otherwise?” he would have asked, if questioned; and dismissed the subject. Nevertheless, he divined that her mind must be in heavy shadow to prompt an immediate act of devotion at some inconvenience, when any other time would have done as well. Scrutinizing her face, he saw the change in it, even through the disguise of a veil with heavy dots. Trained in detail, he remembered that he had never seen her wear such a veil before. His experienced brain travelled to the natural solution. There was truth in the story that she loved the American; and she wished to do penance among the tombs of her ancestors. That meant, of course, that the affair was closed, that when she had realized the enormity of her folly she had hastened to mortify her flesh and spirit in a worthy manner. He had not been surprised to hear that she loved at last, but he wondered at the security into which he had fallen during the preceding ten years, deluded, like others, by her superb indifference; and the evident marks of suffering he saw in her face to-day in nowise set his heart at odds with his purpose to marry her at once. Even were he not now convinced that she might at any moment become a menace to the Dual Monarchy, or had he been less harassed by those that feared and hated her, he still would have used his authority to marry her without delay. He knew the weaknesses of his blood, and was determined that her very obvious genius to make the world ring with a scandal should be clogged immediately. He resolved, however, to defer the subject until the morrow, snatching at the prospect that the midnight vigil would subdue and chasten her spirit. He answered as if he had given her request due consideration:

“There is no objection, if you are sure you have the strength to go through the ordeal—that you will not have an attack of hysteria. Of course”—in response to an indignant ejaculation—“I know you are not that sort of woman, but it will be a trying hour. Sarolta must accompany you to the church; she can wait for you in one of the chapels or in the carriage. And a friar will go down with you to hold the taper. I insist upon that.”

“Very well,” said Ranata listlessly. The friar would be an integral part of the scene, like enough to those who had gone down with her ancestors, dead and alive.

She sat through the early dinner with her father, but five o’clock was now her hour for tea, and she made a bare pretence to eat. She wondered if she would be hungry in the crypt, then scowled so severely at her levity that Count von Königsegg, who was watching her, feared that her suspicions had been roused by something in the dull flow of conversation. Several of the archdukes were present, besides the many members of the Emperor’s household, and they were mildly discussing a crisis in the Reichsrath. The minister had greeted her coldly. He was profoundly annoyed at the sensation she had made, and the consequent failure of their carefully laid plans. That she would play her cards in Hungary with the historic tact of the Hapsburgs he had made no doubt, and that she could fascinate and beguile he had had personal evidence; but that she had in her the elements of a public popularity, so desirable in a sovereign, and so reprehensible in anything less than the acknowledged heir to the throne, he had not for a moment suspected. These last weeks had left him aghast, for he was by no means desirous of the slightest disturbance in the present order of things, nor to be the victim of suspicion from those who might one day be in a position to elevate or ruin him. He had been prepared to declare for the Archduchess if she played her part properly, and her star shot up at precisely the right moment; but for the present he was puzzled how to act. His instinct was to desert the sinking ship, but he found it difficult to connect Ranata with the idea of failure; she looked, pallid and extinguished as she was, cast for a great part—not endowed by Nature with the finest gifts of the Hapsburgs to languish in obscurity. He did not approve of marrying her. The Emperor’s course must be nearly run, and she would be a valuable card to hold when the anticipated calamities fell upon them. However, the man selected was of Hapsburg blood; no vow of renunciation would be required of her, and at the right moment she could be summoned forth. Perhaps it was as well; for what to do with her meanwhile, he confessed, was beyond any inspiration likely to visit his fertile brain. Perhaps she would be ill for a time; she looked so unlike her usual self as to invite the hope, and that at least would keep her quiet for some months.

Ranata, suspecting naught of these unsympathetic reflections, was longing for the night. When she was finally alone in her rooms—those rooms that looked like nothing outside the Hofburg except other musty old palaces where the sun never entered—she sat down in the dark and attempted to prepare her mind for the ghostly pilgrimage. Her sense of drama was stirred at the thought of performing this ancient rite, but she felt less religious than she had hoped, less ancestral, less akin to those quaking girls who had been swept down into the cold vault of the Capuchin by the stern arm of Maria Theresia. One had died of the small-pox, caught from the emanations of a recent victim—doubtless the poor little body had half-disintegrated with fright, and let the poison in. She wondered if she would be frightened, and dismissed the thought with an impatient shrug. Her strong soul had little acquaintance with fear. Still she would have welcomed a premonition of it at this moment, if it had brought on its long shadows the first mutters of ancestral superstition—the first stirring of her stupefied Hapsburg sense. But her thought flew to Fessenden Abbott. She wrenched it from him, and it fluttered about among the pleasures and distractions of her months in Hungary. She found herself longing for the bright rooms in the palace of Buda, the bustling business-like streets of Pest. She recalled her first and only visit to a shop, and wished she might repeat the experience on the morrow; she had had many vivid accounts of the shops of Vienna from Alexandra, who, untrammelled by state, or even by the haughty usages of the aristocracy, visited the shops as often as she pleased.

“I feel hopelessly modern, frivolous,” she thought, as she rose and walked to the window. “But it is merely the perversity of the brain. Like a spoiled child, it must do precisely what is not expected of it. I thought I had disciplined it better.”

She held aside a corner of the lace curtain, and peered down into the court-yard, and at the battered walls opposite. There would have been no danger of detection had her room been light, for the rain was falling heavily. The court-yard was deserted; and the scene was intolerably dreary. A prison-yard could be no worse.

Suddenly she was seized with a wild unreasoning terror, an impulse to fly from the Hofburg to Budapest and her many friends. A premonition seemed to rise out of the dark and press close upon her. Her brain tossed up the reserve, the embarrassment of her father’s manner, the watchful speculative regard of Königsegg’s cold eyes, the sensation of insignificance that had vaguely assailed her as she arrived in Vienna—of stepping down from a pedestal to withdraw into a niche. Why had she left Hungary? There she would have been safe, for nothing short of violence could have removed her, and that they would not dare to use. She touched the electric button as soon as she could find it; and when the room was softly brilliant, she wondered at her nerves. Determined to reduce them to subjection before their midnight ordeal, she sat down with a novel Alexandra had given her at parting. This was not the preparation for nocturnal prayer she might have wished, but it could be no more mischievous than her own unruly thoughts. It proved to be absorbing—a brisk well-written tale of mediæval love and adventure, war and romantic incident, without psychology, or a reminder of modern life and character. It was not the literature of her habit, but for that reason perhaps held her the more closely, the tenor of her mind being altered, and life as she knew it best forgotten. When, at a quarter to twelve, one of her maids entered with a long fur garment, and the announcement that the Obersthofmeisterin awaited the pleasure of her Imperial Highness, she arose with reluctance, and, as the woman adjusted the cloak and hood, glanced at the finish. “If I had not been sure of that final rapture,” she informed herself apologetically, “I believe I could not have rid my mind of it in the church.”

XXX

Sarolta had sunk on a hot-water cushion in one of the chapels of the Capuchin Church, after an involuntary appeal to her archduchess to pray no longer than she could help. The friar, a dark blur in his brown robes, unlocked the door that opens on the winding stair sacred to the House of Hapsburg. As Ranata carried a lighted taper in her own hand, she motioned to him to walk behind her, and picked her way on the uneven stones worn by four centuries of men and women who had gone down with the dead, or to pray among the ruins of those who had ruled and loved and oppressed, or battled in secret and impotence with the wretched comedy of their existence. Twice before—since her early girlhood, when her tutor in history had included an occasional visit to the Hapsburg dust in his course—had Ranata descended this stair: behind the coffin of Rudolf, and the coffin of her mother. The first time she had been blind and dumb with grief; the second, horror-stricken as she still was, she had meditated sadly upon the conquest of life over the charming and singular woman she had known so little. To-night, as she reached the foot of the stair, and held the taper aloft, she was conscious of little but the cold and the dank smell of death, which in spite of glass and lead and bronze, and robbed of its final offensiveness, pervades the crypt. It is an odor hardly definable; it might be the very breath of Death himself rising thickly through earth and mould.

Ranata shuddered and drew her cloak about her, but walked resolutely down between the long rows of sarcophagi, elaborate and ostentatiously simple, crowding close behind the bars. She was thankful that her father had insisted upon the escort of the friar; but when she came to the great gates behind which Maria Theresia still reigns in the pomp of death over those that have followed her, and her silent attendant had turned the key, she motioned to him to remain without.

She stood for a moment looking with a curious impersonality, of which she could not divest herself, at the magnificent leaden sarcophagus, on its pedestal, of one of the few great rulers of Austria. The carving and chasing, the bas-reliefs and fixtures, were so elaborate and beautiful that she caught herself wondering how many years the august remains had awaited their final state, or if the far-sighted Empress had set the craftsmen to work long before her death. She was a practical soul, and it was likely. At her feet, in the plainest of leaden coffins, lay the husband she had loved and snubbed. About her, in receptacles of varying art and costliness, were nine of her sixteen children.

Ranata turned her back upon the last vanity of the ancestor who had been a religion of her youth, and passing the equally lofty but far less imposing sarcophagus of Franz II., with the perfunctory receptacles of his four wives scattered near, she paused for a moment beside the long coffins of Napoleon’s second wife, and of him who had been called King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt—he whom the French remembered as the second Napoleon when his cousin seized the throne. She stared down at the lead above the dust of the little cousin for whom she had much sympathy and compassion, knowing him to have been the victim of court intrigues, his soul and body systematically ruined. She wondered how much rebellion had beaten beneath that apparent docility, how much cunning, perhaps; biding his time in his grandfather’s old age, hating and fearing Metternich, yet neither wise enough nor strong enough to avoid the traps that never cut his feet, and closed about him as softly and warmly as sirens and drugs. She wondered if the French poet had divined the secretive nature correctly, or if a true Hapsburg brain had dissolved in the silences of the crypt; then, if the ruined soul had been graciously relit in consideration of its youth and ignorance; if, in some juster world, the fine brain he may have inherited might not now in its maturity be fulfilling the purpose for which it had sprung from a force that would still seem to haunt the earth.

These were not the thoughts, the sulking superstitions, she had come to evoke, and she passed on. The alcove containing what was left of her mother and brother, with the angel between them presented by the ladies of Hungary, was before her, but she wished before kneeling and praying there to saturate herself with this subtle atmosphere of ancient death, of indestructible repose, of serene and final disassociation from the world above. This portion of the crypt is only two-thirds below ground. A high small window admits a patch of light by day; but the glass is heavy, and no sound penetrates. The Hapsburgs sleep as quietly as the Pharaohs.

Ranata wandered past the brilliant silver-like coffin of Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, but she did not linger; she had little sympathy with the unknown uncle whose wavering brain had cost him throne and life. “If I had had Mexico,” she thought arrogantly, “I should have kept it. Picturesque an object as he was with his American empire, and his brave death, he will never be a favorite in history or romance, for human nature despises the waverer. What the Americans call bluff is not only the wiser policy, but makes a stronger appeal to the imagination.” She walked down between the long rows of the lesser dead, pausing a moment at the simple coffin of that cousin who had set her thin frock on fire with a lighted cigarette, hastily concealed as her father approached. She smiled with tender pity, grateful that her own parent, obdurate in many things, was advanced in a few simple particulars.

Finally she returned to the elevated remains of the old Emperor Franz, and holding her taper high, looked slowly about her. It was a sufficiently grewsome sight, those piles and rows of gray sarcophagi, most of them but stark shadows under the meagre light she carried, and the ray of a lamp that filtered through the little window. She gave an involuntary shudder of feminine horror, and once more experienced a throb of gratitude for the proximity of the friar, standing beyond the door. He had extinguished his taper and looked like a statue at prayer. Her eye rested again on the coffin of the Duc de Reichstadt. “Poor Franz!” she thought. “What barbarians they were only two-thirds of a century ago! I wonder how much better we are now—they! I feel, rather, as if my spirit had been purged down here, than packed with its old ghosts.”

She let her taper trail on the stones. Her pilgrimage was a failure. The night and its horrid suggestions had accomplished no degeneration for her; she might as well have come by day, or spared at any time her limbs the cold, her nostrils this infliction. And there she faced and accepted the truth. What she had been was gone, what she was so must she remain. Her brain in its absolute modernity must help her to endure and to regulate her life; from her ancestors she would receive no further help, neither now nor ever. From all miasmatic obsessions rising out of the crypt in her soul she was free henceforth; the crypt itself had vanished into that eternity so far from the corruption about her. She lifted her head suddenly with a sensation of liberty, of independence, which even Hungary and her intimate spiritual absorption of her American lover had not given her. Then she went forward and knelt at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin. She had rejected dogmas and theologies, but she still could pray; for she had perfect faith in an overruling power, who, if great enough to manage the universe, must be great enough to answer prayer without upsetting the balance of His machinery. And prostrate at the foot of the ugly bronze coffin under half its height of brittle wreaths, that held the clay of the warmest nature she had ever known, of the only being she had deeply loved until now, of the Hapsburg whose light might have raised him so high in history and had gone out in folly and dishonor, she had her moment of profound tribute to the dead, of utter abnegation of self. When she rose from her knees she entered the recess, and pushing aside the old wreaths with their emblazoned streamers, the gifts of kings, and princes, of family, and illustrious subjects, she pressed her wet face for a moment to the head of the coffin, then walked rapidly from the inner crypt, down the lane between the older dead, and up the stair.

Sarolta was not in her chapel, and, dismissing the friar, Ranata left the church. The Obersthofmeisterin was in a corner of the carriage sound asleep. The coachman slept profoundly on the box. The footman had disappeared. Ranata stood alone in the streets of Vienna. The clock struck one. She, a daughter of the Hapsburgs, was as free as any waif in the city. The sensation of liberty which had taken possession of her down in the crypt surged wildly to her head. She walked swiftly to the corner and stood there, pushing back her hood and staring about her. The rain had ceased, but the night was black. What was there to prevent her from finding a cab, driving to the station, and taking the first train for Berlin? If Fessenden were not already there a telegram would summon him in haste. From Berlin it was but a few hours to Bremen. She took another step forward, then almost laughed aloud. Was this the first result of her rendezvous with the dead? But if that had been futile, her brain and her sense of duty were still in control. She had renounced love once for all. Moreover, her flight would mean the exile and disgrace in her old age of Sarolta. To-morrow she would return to Hungary and take up her work there. Now that she knew exactly on what forces she must rely, she could hope to walk her self-appointed path without faltering; and in gratitude for her strength, and for a memory which the inflexible laws of her station could never take from her.

Nevertheless, she lingered for a time, walking aimlessly to and fro, for it was the most complete liberty she had ever known, and she enjoyed it much as a child enjoys itself the first time it runs away. It also appealed to her sense of humor, and she would have been amused still more could she have come face to face with her father.

And so she rejected her second opportunity for flight and actual liberty, awakened the terrified coachman, and returned to the Hofburg.

XXXI

She slept well, and late; then being already long past her early hour of rising, lay for a time, half in pleasure of that narrow world wherein she still could confuse dreams and life, half in dread of the realities into which she must step with her clothes. Should she go to Budapest that day? It occurred to her too late that it is more difficult to return to the associations identified with the intense or tragic moments of life even than to remain among them. Should she stay in Vienna for a few days? The Hofburg had never seemed so dreary; her own rooms were musty and chill. In Buda, at least, she would be companioned, and she should find novel work to do immediately upon her return. She remembered Fessenden’s early suggestion to conciliate the Independents by inviting their wives to the palace. Many of these men were her slaves, but of them several would not come to Buda, and others held wholly aloof. She should persuade to her cause, as soon as she returned, the patriotism of the influential women of the aristocracy. And there were charities to organize, subtler methods of conquest to be conceived, now that society had been won by gayeties and pleasure. As soon as the winter broke she would make her progress through the country; she had made the impression she desired on the crowds that had met her at the stations in Transylvania. It was all easy enough, this brilliant preliminary, but what of the future? Would she have her great public career, and would it console her for the renunciation of what she wanted at that moment more than the career of a Maria Theresia or even the triumph of cold duty? As she awoke fully the tenderness and passion, roused and stimulated, yet so little satisfied in these past weeks, which for two days and nights had been quiescent under the sullen despair of her brain, now, after long hours of refreshing sleep, rushed in tumult through all her channels of emotion; and all her soul and body shook with longing and regret. Why should she not see him once more? And would it always be once more, and once more? Would her life be bearable if his expulsion from it were final? She had not seen so far into the future while with him, but now it looked as empty and cold as space. Could this be the end? She almost cried the words aloud as she sprang from her bed in a frantic desire to take some step—at once—before it was too late. He could not have sailed, for he had told her he should spend some days in Berlin, and his yacht was at Trieste. She should see him again if the world stood still. In all the emotions that had rent her, even after the terrible deaths of her brother and mother, she had never so faced the awful vista of finality; and she discovered that it was the one for which she had no power in her to endure. Of course he must leave her at last, but not yet! It is all very well for the old and the wise to argue with the accents of fatigue that love is not the only thing in life; so it is not, for those that argue.

She rang. Her women came in and dressed her in a travelling costume. She sent a note to the Princess Sarolta, asking her to be ready an hour hence, and another to her father expressing a wish to bid him Aufwiedersehen. The Emperor replied that he would call upon her as soon as she had finished her coffee, and that it was with regret he was obliged to inform her that her Obersthofmeisterin had caught a severe cold the night before and was unable to leave her bed. He had sent a messenger to Maria Leopoldina, who was at Baden, asking her to resume for the moment her old duties; and doubtless she would arrive in the course of the day.

It was a long message, and the Emperor had taken the trouble to write it, when a simple announcement by a chamberlain that he would call upon her immediately would have sufficed. Ranata left her breakfast-room abruptly, and stood alone in her dressing-room removing her hat with shaking fingers. For what was he preparing her? What pathway smoothing for himself? Had Piroska tattled? Was she to receive the paternal fiat that she must never see Fessenden Abbott again? Her father might require her submission before permitting her to return to Hungary. Had the world come to an end? She felt as if the floor were swaying and sinking.

She heard the Emperor’s voice in the salon, and controlled herself and went in to meet him. Her eyes met his squarely in the manner he detested. He kissed her, however, and congratulated her upon her improved appearance. She had rarely looked better than in this frock of green cloth and steel and sable, so simple and closely fitting that on her slim yet heroic figure it gave her a somewhat warlike appearance. The Emperor himself was looking remarkably well, in his parade uniform with its sky-blue coat and black and scarlet trousers. He had been in the saddle for two hours inspecting his troops, and the fresh color was in his cheeks, his well-exercised body was almost as free and elastic as his daughter’s. He sat erect and alert like the good soldier he was; but with the wariness of the diplomat he had taken the precaution to seek this interview on the enemy’s territory that he might retreat if a sudden lapse in the negotiations seemed wise; he knew that he would be physically unable to expel Ranata from his apartments until she chose to go.

He began with diplomacy, also, asking her of the pilgrimage of the night before; complimented her on her courage and piety—and no man could turn a compliment more neatly. But as Ranata answered him in monosyllables and preserved an upright attitude of expectancy, he felt himself driven towards the point.

“My dear,” he began delicately, “it has come to my knowledge that you are more interested than is prudent in the brother of your friend.” He paused, but as Ranata made no reply, nor even changed color, he continued. “Of course it is to be expected that a girl as beautiful as you are will captivate many men, aloof as you must hold yourself; but I am surprised that you have permitted a devotion so conspicuous as to create gossip. A princess can never be sure that gossip will stop short of scandal; for where a woman may not select her own husband, the idle and the envious are always on the lookout for an irregular connection to gloat over. I am very sorry to seem to reprove you—”

“I have expected it, of course. I knew that the little Zápolya was a spy; and she also wished to marry Mr. Abbott.”

“I hope you will give me the credit of having lived long enough to sift evidence before I decide, of making due allowance for circumstances, and of accepting no evidence unsupported. You and Mr. Abbott have been much in public together; your mutual interest has been commented upon far and wide. I have been warned from more sources than one. If I had known that Count Zrinyi had invited Mr. Abbott—and scarcely any one else!—to accompany you to Transylvania, I should have forbidden the visit. It had long been a part of your programme, and I inferred, as a matter of course, that you would be accompanied by a full court and a large number of guests. There is no doubt in my mind that Zrinyi made this opportunity for you, and he must take the consequences—”

“I doubt if he gave my private affairs a thought. He may have cared to entertain me as a princess, but his first object was to see as much of Alexandra alone as possible—in romantic surroundings.”

“That may be. Now I must ask you if you are prepared to deny that you took a walk at midnight up there alone with Mr. Abbott; that you managed upon numberless occasions to see him alone—at Buda, as well as at Zrinyi-vár? That he wore Prince Nadasdy’s costume on the night of the fancy-dress ball, and that you both retired simultaneously—”

“I deny nothing,” said Ranata. “I am in no humor to make a sentimental confession. Your Majesty may believe or not that I love him. I have, however, sent him away. That should satisfy you. You will accept my word, I suppose.”

“Your word is the last I should doubt. But I happen to know that human nature is stronger than promises. You will not send for him, but he will return. He is a young man with an exceptional record for attaining his ends. If he manages to see you alone again after a separation”—he spread out his little hands with the grace of his Spanish ancestors—“I should not answer for the consequences. If you were your mother I should have no apprehension, for she was devoid of passion; but you are a Hapsburg, and God knows I have had knowledge enough of the weakness of my race to act promptly when I am graciously vouchsafed a timely warning.”