Chapter XII: Part II: I (7)

Even Molnár looked slightly mollified, but he had come to make good his cause before a princess who he believed must influence the King her father, since he was convinced she could twist Hungary round her finger if she chose. “It is to be hoped that another century will see us even in advance of where the United States stands to-day,” he replied; “for, as you justly observed, it is our part as an intelligent nation to profit by the mistakes of other nations. But it is impossible to admit that we are unwise to insist upon the adoption of our language as the sole language of our army, even in the old age of the King; for we are convinced that our disruption from Austria is but a question of a few years, and it is wise to accustom the inferior races to the dominance of our language and rule as long before our independence as possible. It is our misfortune that we have not been in a position to push this claim sooner. It was a tremendous innovation when Kossuth and Szechenyi carried their point that Magyar should be the political language of Hungary. It was not the part of wisdom to ask for more then, but that is half a century ago--half a century. And you call us impatient and unreasonable! You--who are so recently come from the battle-field, do you recall the passionate enthusiasm with which you sang and listened to your national hymns by your camp-fires at night--as you marched to the battle-field? What would have been your emotions if you had been compelled to sing the national songs of another country? Good God! Cannot you understand what it would mean to us to sing our own beautiful battle hymns in our own beautiful language, instead of the words of a hated power in the most hideous sounds that ever were invented to torture the ear? It is true that you have set your national anthem to the tune of England’s, but you have long since forgotten that; and I am told that when Americans go to England they are flattered when the band plays ‘God Save the King.’ But that is your happiness--that you have been permitted to forget--while we--we--”

“I have no doubt that if you asked for the privilege of ringing your national hymns, and nothing more, the King would readily indulge you; and the Hungarian military colleges you are sure to have will no doubt entail much that you wish--if you have the patience to wait. I admit, of course, that vanity has no part in your desire to sing your own anthems in your own language--what more inspiring?--but the imposing of your difficult tongue on the Austrians who are obliged to command in your army during the years when you must still have an insufficiency of Hungarian officers, as well as upon the races that hate you now, and only await the opportunity to serve you the same trick they served you in 1847--I repeat, it seems to me the height of vanity and folly. And I regret it deeply, for in a struggle in which you were incontestably right, you would have the sympathy of the United States. Kossuth is by no means forgotten; and the American loves romance, having so little of it. For romance you stand in history preeminently. But if you make yourselves ridiculous--”

“Ridiculous?” All four were muttering. Ranata leaned forward, and drew Molnár’s eyes to hers.

“How would it have been if Rudolf had lived?” she asked softly.

“Ah, Rudolf!” The four men might have received an electric shock. “If our crown prince had lived,” cried Molnár, “he would be our sympathetic, our indulgent ruler to-day. The King would surely have abdicated in his favor before this--if he had been reluctant we should have found a way to persuade him! The King is preferable to his present heir; and not only do we hesitate to incur the antagonism of the world by embittering the last days of our old monarch, but it is a trait of human nature to postpone the evil day. But Rudolf! He would have granted our demands; and with his tact and resource have found a way to reconcile all the other states in the monarchy to our reforms. Perhaps he would have given us our liberty, and accepted the presidency of the republic! That indeed would have been Utopia!”

“No one can admire and regret Rudolf more than I do,” said Fessenden, in the even dispassionate tones which irritated the Hungarians more than his words; “but it is impossible not to notice that the inevitable legend is growing up round his name. In a few years it will obscure an individuality and a mental endowment that were better left unexaggerated. I came on the scene too late to know him, but I have heard him much discussed by more than one of his close personal friends; and while he was far more genial and sympathetic than is common among princes, and far more liberal and broad-minded, I do not in the least believe that he had a republican instinct, or would have parted voluntarily with an inch of his inheritance. Rather he would have conceived it his mission to maintain its integrity with the last corps of his army. No doubt his tact and his alert modern brain would have found a way through these difficulties which would have satisfied himself and Hungary. Problems that seem insoluble to an aged king might have been disentangled readily enough by him. But the hard fact remains that you have not Rudolf to deal with, but your king--and, for a period after him, no doubt, the present Crown Prince; so would you not be wiser to conciliate your enemies until you are strong enough to crush them? Suppose Germany and Austria in a war against Russia--over the Balkans, let us say--do you realize what your position would be as an independent state with all the antagonistic races within your borders in revolt--these races number 7,500,000, nearly half your population, do they not? In some respects the Hungarian mind is the brightest and most alert in Europe, and you are probably the only monarchical people wholly without servility. If you wreck yourselves, and this rich and enterprising country, because you love your weaknesses more than your virtues, then you deserve to be crushed like an egg between the enemies who will take a particular delight in the process. But your party does not represent Hungary. The enlightened majority are not extremists. You can obstruct and keep the country in a turmoil, but when it comes to the general vote you must be beaten. But meanwhile you are demoralizing Hungary at home, and making it ridiculous abroad--that is the point to be considered now.”

Molnár pushed back his chair and stood up, tossing back his head. For the moment he looked like the statue of the poet of the Revolution, Alexander Petöfi, which, in its square across the river, seems to have the nerves of the dead man in it.

“You pay us your cold tribute,” he cried, “but what do you know of the ardor, the passionate enthusiasm of a race as different from yours as the Latin from the Teutonic. Logic! We have as much as any men when our hearts are not on fire with our wrongs; but we would rather die, die, die--be crushed like an egg, if you will--than exist like slaves a generation longer.” He turned suddenly to Ranata, his face illuminated under its perpetual frown. “You--your Royal Highness”--he cried, “if you were our queen--you, who look born to sit on a throne as wisely as Maria Theresia, yet without her bigotry and obstinacy--you, who are so like Rudolf-- Ah! Why not? Why not?”

“We will have our coffee in the next room,” said the Archduchess with cold severity, as she rose and led the way. “Úr Molnár, have you seen the river and Pest from the balcony?”

XXI

Fessenden and Ranata were alone in the Hungarian house. Upon the departure of the Independents--diverted and mollified--the Archduchess had dismissed her weary ladies-in-waiting; and Alexandra, after wandering down to the garden with her brother and friend, had stolen away to sleep until the hour to drive.

“You heard!” said Ranata. “Do you doubt now that I could be queen in Hungary?”

“I never doubted it; nor that your reign would be as exciting as brief. Hungary is now enjoying her days of halcyon peace. When your father dies she may not only have your cousin of Austria, and William, to reckon with, but King Karl of Roumania. It is the secret and persistent ambition of his life to win back to Roumania the lands it claims it owned before the conquest of Árpád, and one of these is not only Transylvania, but Hungary as far as the Theiss. He would join Austria in any attempt to crush Hungary, and he would be abetted by all the internal enemies of this country. Moreover, he hates William as only one strong personality can hate another, and at the first call of Hungary for the German Emperor, or for his second son, he would not wait for Austria. He is a big man in a small country, and has never yet had his opportunity; but when it comes he will grasp it, be sure of that. But have you not had enough of all this for one day?”

“Yes--what a contrast you were! I never so fully realized the destiny of the American race. Your brain remains as cold as your eyes until the right moment comes to let the fires leap up. And then! Tell me--I have thought constantly of all that you said last night--it seems to me that you felt yourself safe enough in declaring that you would sacrifice everything for me--ambitions, fortune, country--because you knew the obligation never would confront you. It is I who would have to renounce all and follow you. Austria would expel us both, and could do you no harm.”

“It is you who are most distressingly practical to-day. Why analyze the vows of a lover? I spoke the language of the heart last night, and my brain took the rest it needs. You were convinced of my sincerity then--and I am quite prepared to say it all over again.” And so he did; but although he could make love with an intensity which Ranata would be likely to recall in long hours of separation, he was still able to practise the better part of valor; and with the natural egotism of man, he was soon talking into a sympathetic ear of his hopes and plans for the future. Never was the egotism of man so wise in its exercise. It was the last magnet he needed to draw the soul of the woman to him. As he unrolled his vast schemes, so practical and so ideal, Ranata forgot her own conventional ambitions. She seemed to herself to step out of a volume of history and mingle in the great throng of individuals, who made their own laws and thought for themselves.

“Before many years have passed,” said Fessenden, “I hope to have united South America in one great republic. It is not only necessary to protect my railways--the element of personal selfishness must enter into everything that hopes to succeed--but I want to see the republican ideal flourish over the greater part of the civilized globe before I die.”

“And then? Shall you rule over these vast republics?”

“Not I! I shall have all the work I want while creating them. There may come the crisis in the United States which I have been trained to meet, and the result might compel an interval of strong centralization. But the reconstruction finished, those could rule who were equal to the task. And such an interval would be brief, for the American would not stand the infringement of his liberties a moment longer than circumstances demanded. Although I believe in permanent centralization, to the extent of a ruler elected for life or good behavior--and I believe this principle is growing in the minds of all thinking republicans who are not only sick of corruption but of seeing a fine man in the presidential chair the slave of politicians, and shelved coincidently with the full development of his usefulness--still that ruler must be the free and deliberate selection of the majority of the people, and a monarch by their will alone, with no privileges whatever for his heirs. With democracy I have no more patience than with the autocracy of Russia, but I should be the last to blight an instinct which it is my desire to sow broadcast over the earth. It is for that I wish to be remembered; they can forget the dramas as soon as they like--”

“Ah, but tell me those!” exclaimed Ranata. “I have waited for years to hear them.”

He entertained her with several of his adventures and exploits in South America, but dropped the subject to tell her something of his problem in mechanics and electricity.

“If anything was needed when I awoke at noon to-day to make me feel as if I owned the entire universe,” he said, “it was a letter from my chief electrician which convinced me for the first time that he was on the verge of perfecting this old dream of mine. My father was to go out as soon as telegraphed for and witness the practical demonstration. Then, indeed, I practically will hold the fate of the world in the hollow of my hand.”

Ranata stared hard at him, her pulse quickening. She had always envied him, and now he seemed to her to embody all the hopeful ambitions of all the world, a Titan whom only a new country with its utter disregard of failure could have produced. What order of men would his republics bring forth?

“But shall you never have a reverse, never fail?” she murmured. “There is a relentless law of compensation in Nature; surely you must have your blows, your bitterness, like other mortals.”

“I have already had enough trouble and anxiety, to say nothing of hideous privations, fatigue, and illness to satisfy Nature for the present. The only blow that could have reached my heart before this would have been the death of my father.”

“Ah!” she exclaimed sharply, “you do love me--I know how much! When this is over, will its memory mean as much to you as it will to me? Will the loss embitter, discourage you? It has seemed to me since last night that it will mean too much to me--that I shall need more courage than I possess to live on. With men--with you? How would it be, with your thousand occupations where I might not have one? Oh, at least help me to win this country! I fear no enemies--nothing else on earth.”

“All that,” said Fessenden, “is a subject which I positively refuse to discuss until these two months are up. All I wish you to be firmly convinced of from this moment--and you might repeat it nightly with your prayers lest you forget it--is that, under no possible circumstances short of death, shall I give you up, or relax for a moment in my determination to overcome every obstacle which either you or your father may raise. The sooner you recognize me as your destiny the better.”

XXII

When a woman is groping about among the mysteries of her great passion she has little to give the world, and, all the forces of her being consuming her inwardly, her magnetism is diminished. With the average woman this matters little--she merely bores her friends; but in the case of a princess, with but a season perhaps at her disposal within whose limits to preserve the map of Europe, or alter it to her liking, the untimely advent of love might blight her in the very plethora of her opportunities. Ranata realized this danger after a few days of complete indifference to anything but her own thoughts and the presence of Fessenden Abbott, discovered that she had fallen back into the niche of the unapproachable princess, from which only he could draw her. The moment she appreciated her condition she roused, when in public, the energies of her mind, wrenching it from her inner life. A career she was determined to have; and although she could not recall the enthusiasm of those first weeks in Hungary, her purpose was revitalized by the long shadows of bitterness and despair which the future cast back to her. True to her compact, she endeavored to eject that future from her imagination, and in greater part succeeded, for she had more wisdom than most women, and appreciated the priceless value of the immediate happiness. She was content, and in brief intervals intensely happy; her imagination was liberated and her power to feel superlative. The knowledge that both imagination and capacity for living must prove her scourge hereafter but made her cultivate both the more ardently while briefly mistress of her fate. And the concentrated ardor of which Fessenden was capable in the rare moments they found alone, contrasted with his average mood when he seemed to belong so wholly to himself, fascinated her far more than any constant evidence of her consuming influence over him would have done. Her own powerful individuality recognized the separateness of his, and was content to touch it in fugitive moments only. The archaic poem of eternal oneness made no appeal to her. Passionate love and loyal friendship she had to offer in the fullest equipment granted to mortals, but the development of her own individuality in its incorruptible silences must go on forever, submerged only by the primal tides; and so her instincts and her endowment saved her from the pursuit of that will-o’-the-wisp which most women follow until it hides in the grave. She saw that Fessenden recognized in her this disunion of temperament and personality, for although his were the masculine limitations which deprived him of the comprehensions women think they want, the needs of his own soul were too great for blindness to another that had come so close.

Therefore, Ranata, although she loved her hours of solitude the more, and even grudged her brain its sleep, reopened her windows to the world before it was too late. She entertained frequently, and many of the magnates gave superb entertainments in her honor. Fessenden, Zrinyi, and several other young enthusiasts, arranged an illuminated fête on the Danube, and for a few moments she believed herself to be a fairy princess on a fairy planet. Every house, great and small, on the hills of Buda, burned its colored lights, and the bridges, the islands, the boats, looked as if on fire with the souls of stars and flowers. The fireworks among the ruins of the castle on the height completed a scene of illusion possible in only three or four cities of the world.

Her own entertainments were given in no perfunctory fashion. She had one state dinner a week, and small dinners and luncheons for the better study of the Hungarian character. There was no theatre in the palace, but she had a stage erected in the Hall of Ceremonies, and Possart came from Munich to give the soliloquy of Manfred among the snow-fields of the Alps, in what is perhaps the most perfect German spoken in a great empire where perfect German is seldom heard. Fremstadt came with him to sing from “Carmen”; and Frau Schratt and other artists of Vienna were engaged for the later winter. The local poets were permitted to declaim, and their emotional fires and abandon won the English and American guests, long divorced from patience with drawing-room inflictions.

But the Hungarians shone most brilliantly in music, and there were frequent concerts in the palace, given entirely by members of the aristocracy, which inspired no comparison with professionals. When the Archduchess found time she went to the theatre or opera, and sat in the gala box, wearing her best conceived gowns, and having taken care that her intention should be announced in the morning newspapers.

And so Budapest had its gay winter at last--a winter that exceeded even longings and dreams, and made the heart of the tradesman sing, and filled the hotels with curious and ambitious visitors. But perhaps the true rapture dwelt in the pen of the correspondent, so long driven in the mere service of politics for the casual glance of a world at no pains to understand that it might yet be the destiny of Hungary to precipitate the great convulsion of Europe. These grateful gentlemen quickly made Ranata the most famous woman on the public stage. Her pictures were sold in every capital, the illustrated weekly newspapers presented her to a delighted public in all her available aspects, and girl reporters came to Budapest and wrote imaginary interviews with her maids.

No one knew better than Ranata that this glitter and tinsel was but the prelude to true fame, and that without the opportunity to prove her wisdom as a ruler she would take no place in history outside the covers of some “Book of Beauty”; nevertheless she found the notoriety and incense sweet after her long monotonies, and her pride was deeply gratified with the unequivocal success of her first programme. She would have been more satisfied if she could have had proof of the jealous uneasiness of William of Germany; and more secure if the state of mind of the Crown Prince of Austria and Hungary could have been revealed to her. But if Fessenden corresponded with his friend he made no confidences; and neither her father nor Count von Königsegg mentioned her cousin in their letters, although they appeared to commend her course.

But to Ranata’s surprise and occasional alarm, she frequently discovered that her imagination dwelt less on her future in history than on the great schemes of Fessenden Abbott, and that her thoughts were far more occupied with their unique and interesting details than with the future complexities of Europe, which long since had acquired the habit of repeating themselves. Gone were the hours when she had striven to untangle the web of her empire’s future, to fit herself for every imaginable contingency. When her womanhood took its temporary rest, her brain was far more apt to dwell upon some point that was puzzling Fessenden. She reminded herself that this may have been the result of their daily conversations, his abrupt confidential asides; and believed she might assure herself that when the spell was removed her interest in subjects so foreign to all in her previous twenty-eight years would vanish with the sweetness of life.

But they were not foreign to everything, she suddenly reminded herself. There was Alexandra! Would this sense of intimacy with the brother have descended upon her so quickly, even with the assistance of love, had it not been preceded by that other long intimacy? How deep had the influence of this American sunk? What changes had it perhaps wrought in her character during those eighteen years of almost constant mental friction, beginning when her mind was plastic, and always making her chief interests in life? Nothing is more difficult than to concentrate the mind in self-analysis, self-examination; the children of the experience resent the scientific probing of the mind and hide in the shadowy deeps. Ranata was forced to recur to the subject abruptly, to glimpse her mental layers by flashlight. It was difficult even then to make sure what tracings had been done by an alien hand, much less to imagine just what she would have been had that hand been withheld; but finally she learned enough to cause her moments of deep uneasiness, grave doubts if she were so inviolate a Hapsburg as she had believed; and when she realized there had been intervals when her emancipated and now rebellious imagination had transported her to the American continent, where she moved with the assurance and the vivid sense of freedom of the American girl, she shrank in terror, as if already she had taken a traitorous and irrevocable step. She had always been convinced that she should find all things in the American section of America quite detestable, from their very unlikeness to all things sanctified by the traditions of Europe; but now she emerged from visions of herself penetrated with happiness in a romantic wilderness of mountain and forest, or in cities which epitomized that wonderful modern life which seemed to relegate the old to boards and calf-skin. There were times when she actually felt the rush and fever of the life in her veins. It was then that she turned her mind to Hungary. She had been deeply gratified to learn that on the greater portion of the Left, William had made no impression, except to deepen their hatred and distrust of Germany. That this enthusiastic and ofttimes desperate party was being secretly drawn to her standard, Ranata was not long discovering. For a time, at least, they would accept a queen where they would reject a king, and their susceptible natures inclined them naturally towards a young and beautiful ruler whom they could love, and, no doubt, manage; while she added to their picturesque strength in the eyes of the world. Ranata was aware that the new thought was travelling silently; and while trembling lest it reach Vienna, she dared not notice it sufficiently to demand prudence. The part must be thrust upon her, not only to save her in the eyes of Europe, but the lightest hint of ambition from her would have alarmed the Independents and turned their admiration to contempt.

There were times during this strange interlude in her life when she was possessed by a sensation of supreme joy, or by deep and tranquil happiness--moments when she paced the terrace alone on brilliant mornings in a tumult of wonder, when Budapest, beautiful enough, was glorified, and the links binding her to the mundane were dissolved. In such moments she neither analyzed nor speculated, she but intensely lived; but when they had passed, she wondered if such ideally pagan moments were prophetic of greater happiness, or if they were peculiar to that antechamber of the unknown which is the prelude in love. The possibility depressed her, and at other times she suffered sharply. If Fessenden carelessly laid his arm about Alexandra’s shoulders or took her hand, satisfied in the masculine fashion with what happened to be convenient at the moment, Ranata would turn cold with jealousy and disgust with life. As she was too proud to protest--or explain--she punished the bewildered offender with a freezing demeanor, and both were miserable for several days. The reconciliation, however, enshrined the misery in a halo of gratitude. Her jealousy was purely impersonal, and induced no alteration in her attitude towards Alexandra. It was not the object but the apparent wandering of his affections that concerned her, and the physical manifestation. She took for granted that he loved his sister--would have thought him deficient in human nature if he had not. But that sort of relation was passive; the active he had entered upon embraced her alone. Like other women in love, she was constantly making discoveries about herself; and when, one day, alone with her thoughts, she found herself overwhelmed and dissolved in a transport of maternal tenderness for the man to whom ultimately she could be nothing, she realized for the first time how far love had carried her. This was towards the end of the interlude; and soon after, even the uneasiness of this discovery was forgotten in the haunting dismay which preceded the end.

Meanwhile Zrinyi was manifestly impatient that the visit should be made to his castle in the Transylvanian Alps before the full rigors of winter should compel an indefinite postponement. So far, the winter was mild, and the snow on the lower Alps not so heavy that oxen could not draw the sledges up the steep mountain roads. Ranata, welcoming a few days’ release from the world, and greater freedom, set the date; and it was arranged that the party should consist only of her ladies, Alexandra, Fessenden Abbott, and Prince Illehazy. They were to linger long enough in Klausenbourg, Kronstadt, and the intervening villages, to give the inhabitants a glimpse of their princess, and an opportunity to offer the ovation which once had been their joy to give to Rudolf.

XXIII

When one is standing in a window looking down into a gorge a thousand feet below, the cynical reflections of a mummy in bed smoking a cigar vex the impulse of romance, quick in the brain. Ranata was in the window. The window was Zrinyi’s; so was the perpendicular mountain of which the old border fortress might have been an abrupt continuation, so indeed were the harsh wild peaks, bare but for the glittering snow, which rose high above this lofty height. The mummy was Sarolta, who was in bed with a cold. The invasion of her sacred person by impertinent microbes always put her in a bad humor, and to-day it urged her to improve one of her rare solitudes with her royal charge. Moreover, she was profoundly puzzled. If Ranata was not in love with this American, why then did she show him a preference never before won, for a moment, by another admirer? But if she were in love, why then this serenity? She had expected that Ranata’s inevitable love episode would be fraught with tragedy from the very first, and that pallid cheeks and heavy eyes would be the visible signs, haughtily as the Princess might comport herself. Had the heroine been any one but Ranata she might have drawn a characteristic deduction from this serenity; but although she was not the European to swear to the virtue of any woman, she knew that Ranata, if not bigotedly virtuous, was bigotedly loyal to her house, and had long since made her vow that by no act of hers should another of its stones be loosened; rather was she exalted by the hope that it might be her destiny to save it from destruction. And Sarolta, who had settled back comfortably into her early doctrine that life was made to live, could have gone to the stake herself for the aristocratical or the monarchical ideal. Therefore, she believed that Ranata would immolate her passion on this altar the moment it burned too fiercely; and so, after all, was prepared to take her oath upon the virtue of one woman. Nevertheless, she was curious. Of the compact, of course, she knew nothing; and had she, still would she have puzzled, knowing the power and the will of woman to torment herself; but she had come to the conclusion that it was possible Ranata, never having seen Fessenden alone--this the good lady also believed--did not wholly realize her condition, would not until he left her; so determined to do what she could in the way of preliminary disenchantment.

“There is no greater fallacy,” she was saying, “than the belief that women regret their youth--I mean women who have lived the life of the heart. Nature invariably compensates, and in exchanging wisdom for youth she is at her best. No woman ever crowded more into her youth--nor held to it longer--than I did, yet I can recall now the sensation of relief when I finally realized that henceforth I should live for myself alone; above all, that I had had my final disappointment. For love, my dear, is one exquisite disappointment from first to finish--for the woman, I mean. Men are rarely psychological enough for the disappointments that grind the heart of woman until it is callous. When they are, they are not able to hurt us, so may be left out of the question. The thoroughly masculine man, the only sort that is capable of inspiring the _grande passion_, because he has the primal attributes designed by Nature that he may fully mate with woman, is in the very completeness of his equipment blind to all that is most subtle and feminine in woman, giving her, therefore, twenty strokes of torment to one of happiness, or even pleasure. What is the result? We live, the most irresistible of us, three-fourths--five-eighths--of our lives alone, striving to find in imagination what man will never give us. Life, with women who are not small pieces of pulp in the domestic mill, is one long chase after happiness--what is there for most of us but happiness, politics, and charities? I have sometimes envied the women who have to work their brains blunt to fill their conservative little stomachs!”

Her voice thickening, she paused to inhale the fumes of the last specific for colds. Ranata continued to stare out of the window, and her duenna continued in a moment:

“But I have also wondered, _ma chère_, if, did man give us what that craving thing we call our soul demands, would we enjoy ourselves even as much as we do. It is always a gamble which will tire first, the man or the woman; and on the whole I am inclined to believe that the woman of charm and brain, and the position in life which enables her to find much distraction, is the surer prey to disenchantment. If she be of a deeper nature, or if she has deluded herself for a little that the man actually loved her and not himself, she may not tire, but be so bitterly disgusted and disillusioned that, for a moment, at least, she is capable of tragedy. But the average man, so particular with charm at first, merely lets us down in _ennui_. If he gave woman more of himself than he does now, perhaps she would tire sooner. He needs all the mystery he has. However, the fact remains that man is eternally unsatisfactory and woman eternally unsatisfied. I doubt if a woman of imagination ever lived who, having won what rent her soul and body while withheld, would not, after the first short chapter, exchange the reality for the previous lost world of her imagination. Good God! the disillusionment, the readjustment, the struggle through terror and despair to philosophy! If I were ordered to live my life over, I should demand, in compensation, the ever-fresh memory of a great and unsatisfied passion--after having known one man in the daily life of matrimony. A woman is briefly happy twice in her life--when a man--the man--is pursuing her, and palpitating doubt alternates with delicious certainty; and again, during the man’s first ardor, when he is so anxious to please, and so certain that he loves the woman, not himself, that his concentrated charm blinds, yet irradiates the universe. Shortly after, he becomes as matter-of-fact as he is. And then men are, no matter what their brains, utterly, irretrievably stupid where women are concerned. A man is never so happy as when he has lost the love of the woman, and she, taking refuge in duty, makes him thoroughly comfortable. On the other hand, men are abruptly left by women, again and again, and the cleverest of them never guess the reason why. They go on ruining their own lives--which they never suspect--and those of the women best worth having, without learning a lesson from the past. There is no happiness, my dear, until you are as old as I am, look like a mummy, and smoke _vuelta abajo_.”

“Of course I recognize that all that was meant for me.” Her charge left the window and stared down at her. She puffed out a cloud, for Ranata’s eyes always made her blink. “But I am surprised that a woman of your wisdom should fancy that the person ever lived who would adjust his life by the experience of another.”

“You have a brain. Most women have not. You will always be more or less guided by it. Therefore, you are worth the trouble to warn.”

“You are the last person I should have expected advocate the happiness of the unknown; but I have thought that out for myself, and more than once. I believe that the only way a woman can avoid the cut of her sex is to avoid the fulfilment of love. Then the fates are placated, and, after the first wrench, permit the imagination a certain happiness, the soul a certain elevation, no doubt impossible in what must eventually become prosaic and disappointing.”

“I am not surprised that you have arrived at that truth by yourself; and be sure that all the troubles in the world amount to little if you can bear them alone, and that no troubles, barring poverty and pain, count an infinitesimal speck in the balance with those made by love, or the desperate attempt to find happiness. Indeed, I will modify what I said just now, and stake my life that a woman is happy only when she is not in love. There is no such thing as sympathy between the soul of man and woman. The man who thinks he sympathizes with a woman’s subtle wants is a milksop. The other, the only sort we love, doesn’t try, never thinks about it; and either way we are miserable, having the primal curse of Eve upon us. So, the old maids, or the quickly widowed, have the best of it in this life. Doubtless things are better arranged in another.”

“Perhaps in that we will be born without imagination. I don’t know but that would be the deepest definition of heaven after all.”

“I think it more likely that in alternate existences the man of one is the woman of another,” said Sarolta dryly. “That would be Nature and her compensations as we know them. On the whole she is just.”

XXIV

Fessenden was walking restlessly about the hall of the castle, awaiting the finish of Ranata’s visit of duty at the bedside of her duenna. There was a prospect, for the first time in several days, of an hour with her alone. Zrinyi, Prince Illehazy, Vilma, and Alexandra had gone for a walk, and Piroska had not been seen that day.

They had arrived two days before, after three, in a special train with many pauses and no solitudes, and until now had been a gay and united party. Alexandra had announced herself satisfied with the castle; but as her tone had been frivolous, Zrinyi had forborne to press his suit. The roughness of the old days of border warfare was curiously blended with the modern comforts of a nobleman’s hunting-lodge. The staircase, towards which Fessenden directed eyes of impatient longing, looked as if no woman had ever descended it, although many women had huddled there when the Turkish guns were battering. The logs in the old fireplace, and the big ornamental stones which have superseded andirons in the greater part of Europe, tempered the ancient cold; the rough walls and floors were covered with the skins of wild beasts and other trophies of the chase; and the chairs at least were comfortable. The hall was a museum of old battle-flags, captured from the Turks, Austrians, rival clans in the days of the Oligarchs, and of weapons as old and varied. The castle was very large, and had been surrounded on three sides by a double moat; but to former implements of war it had been impregnable, and the unsquandered wealth of the family had kept every part of it from decay except the entrance wall. Fessenden thought it an admirable setting for a honeymoon; failing that, for a few days’ final courtship.

But his patience, never a gift of Nature, but a creation of his will, was close upon its finish, and the day he left Budapest he had set his train in motion. Only his habit of playing a close and far-seeing game had saved him from some precipitate act which might have wrecked his hopes; for the blood was often in his head. Whether or not Mr. Abbott had had such a crisis as this in mind when he trained his son in the qualities that conquer, in no other way had they served Fessenden so well. He was pitting his wit and his wealth against the mightiest prejudice which existed in the world of his day; and his victory over Ranata must spring solely from the former, for without it her love would avail him nothing. Had he been able to conquer her prejudices by any of the arts of love or passion he would have urged a flight from this castle--which was far from communication with the telegraph, and where the sympathetic Zrinyi would have kept guardians and spies imprisoned--to Trieste, where his yacht awaited him. But he knew that Ranata, although capable of a revolution which would raze the first wall between them, must accomplish that revolution in solitude and despair, under the pressure of circumstances which he had already shaped. The demolishment of the second wall might cost him something almost as dear as the woman, but Fessenden was prepared to sacrifice more than that.

Fortunate for the great affairs of the house of Abbott, that the senior was particularly well at this time! The heir, for all his self-control, was in a state of mind which, had he been compelled to return--and nothing short of his father’s death or a financial panic would have drawn him across the seas--would have lost him the faith of Wall Street.

Since his violent attack of calf-love and the strange illuminations which had succeeded it, he had looked upon woman with a critical eye, and treasured his inmost feelings with a jealous care. Never again, he had determined long since, would he go through that futile agony at the instance of anything less than death; when he found the one woman whom he could love more than his life or his ambitions--or as well--then would he pour all he had husbanded at her feet; but he would have her unless the Almighty himself intervened. Busy as was his life, he had been sharply aware of its incompleteness; there had been many hours of longing for the deep companionship of love, for the perfection of his own soul and manhood. The vague ideal of his dreams he had not recognized in Ranata’s physical part when they met in the cottage, his sense of adventure being keener than any vital longing, and the fury of the dance excluding mental knowledge of his partner. But he had discovered her not long after; and the great measure that he had to offer of homage and love and passion had since burned steadily; with a less strong brain the flame would have been less steady, and the rare moments of solitude with her, and their temptations, might have overwhelmed him: he had never imagined a woman who could so crowd into a moment the concentrated essence of all the melting tenderness and the passionate energy that made up the surrender of woman. It is true that more than once the temptation had assailed him to use her weakness as the shortest way out of the difficulties that beset him; but not only had he so far never taken advantage of any one but a scoundrel, and did he still hold women in an old-fashioned reverence, but he forecast the weeks--perhaps months--asunder, when in desperation she might marry any prince her father selected. And in his cooler moments he tingled at the thought of a victory which would be as great for his young country as for himself, of being the chosen instrument to initiate a new order of things as inevitable as the progress of the world. Romantic as he was, the campaign he had planned--where the only weapons should be his own wit and the millions which the world, with its curious love of self-delusion, affects to despise, typifying as they do modern life itself--appealed to him more powerfully than a flight across a picturesque country of many costumes to his yacht, or a rescue from the palace of Buda. But at present he was not rehearsing his plan of campaign; the coming moment commanded his imagination, and the blood was beginning to pound in his ears when he heard the light rustle of her garments. He sprang up the stairs and met her on the first landing.

“Not here!” she said nervously. “Sarolta is in bed, and Piroska has a toothache; but who knows?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that the Countess Piroska is a spy?” he asked as they crossed the hall to the room Zrinyi called his study, although it had not a book in it.

“Possibly,” said Ranata indifferently. “We are accustomed to spies. That is usually one of the duties of the Obersthofmeisterin. But as Sarolta is too wealthy to be bought, and is of a proved fondness for me, I suppose Count von Königsegg thought it wise to have one in my household he could count on. I doubt if she has made any report of consequence so far, for she has bided her time, hoping that the worst would happen; but she will, for she wants to marry you. But it will matter little now! Our time is almost up!”

She spoke in a tone of profound dejection. The serenity she had maintained in Sarolta’s presence had dropped from her like a mask. In a moment she withdrew from his embrace and leaned against the window-frame and stared down into the ravine where so many Turks had mouldered to dust.

“It is time for the comedy to end,” she said sharply. “Sarolta knows, and before long will interfere. Königsegg is sure to interrogate Piroska before long, if he has not done so already, and there must be many comments in Budapest and Vienna on your long stay here and your constant presence in the palace. Moreover, it is impossible you should remain away from America much longer. The two months you set yourself have nearly passed. Let us talk plainly. My capacity for self-deception is at an end--indeed, for days past it has slipped from me again and again--and I am worried about many other things--”

“What things?” asked Fessenden gently. He gathered his faculties and stood looking at her, from the other side of the narrow window, with his piercing and concentrated glance; but he took her hand and held it tenderly. “At least, if we are soon to part, let there be as little to regret as possible. You owe me your confidence--nor is there any one else to whom you would give it.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That is true enough! To no other have I ever been as--been frank at all. No one else has ever known me, nor ever can. It has given me the most intellectual and voluptuous delight fully to reveal myself for once in my life--I suppose I do not yet realize how much. After all, why should I complain? I have had what most women never find. And I have that sense of the indestructible bond. I shall have it as long as I live. How many that flutter over this earth, do you suppose, have that sense of an everlasting indissoluble embrace? You feel it now. Will you? Will it content you--that sense of spiritual completeness--can you be faithful to that?”

“I should be very grateful for it if I could not find anything better, and I am as capable of complete fidelity as you are. But tell me what other things have worried you.”

“It is this--” Her rising excitement flashed the blood into her face, and she pushed her unsteady hand into her hair, lifting it, as if its weight oppressed her. “In these weeks that have slipped along so easily, so naturally, in which we have found so much happiness, I have--I had grown as accustomed to it all as any engaged girl. My imagination seemed to sleep, or only to give me to you in the future. Nothing in me protested, warned, except a mechanical effort of intellect. It all seemed the most natural thing in the world. I thought when I entered into that compact that I should lead a dual mental life; or rather that I should be wholly yours when with you, and wholly myself when alone, fully alive to the end. But I have been wholly yours when alone, and as wholly oblivious of the future. And that is not all. It needed only you and what you brought me to fill me with a joyous abandon of liberty such as a man might feel who saw and could walk alone for the first time. I had felt something of this before you came, for the sudden change from prison to a comparative freedom almost turned my head; but since you--who breathe liberty, who typify it, who seem to exhale the very essence of your wonderful young country--you who fear no one! who fear no one!--Am I still myself? Am I, Fessenden? That is the thought that has tortured me these last few days--am I unfaithful in some subtle way to my house, to myself, to the future, to Europe, to all that slaves born in the purple should be most steadfast to? Rudolf may have been weak, but he killed himself in a moment when he was mad with his loathing of life and the methods by which he had sought to forget it; but he was incapable of deserting his post deliberately, and if his mind could have been occupied by the duties of a ruler he would have had no time for despair. But I--I feel as if this secret revolution in me had made me capable of greater than weakness--that is common enough in my class! It has bred in me an indifference--there, I have said it!--to all that I have held most sacred. I feel as if I had slipped into another world. My rigid love of duty, even my old superstitions, they have--they had gone. But I have dragged them back. Last night as I lay awake it seemed to me that I clawed them out of their graves and shook and warmed them into life. I have escaped a deadly peril. I know that when you have gone I shall gradually become myself again--if not quite the same, if without enthusiasm, at least I shall fit into the old routine--”

“And you believe that?” asked Fessenden. “You will no more fall back into your old state of mediæval ignorance and superstition than I shall be wholly myself until I possess you. You have been remade. You have come to life, and only in me. You will return neither to separateness nor to ignorance. The imagination is quiescent while companioned--but wait!”

“Do you know, there have been moments when, if you had asked me, I believe I should have fled with you to your yacht? I don’t know myself! I almost long to have you gone that I may suffer to the utmost capacity of my nature, and then adapt myself to the future.”

He had taken out his watch. “By carriage and a good many changes of train we could reach Fiume some time to-morrow; a telegram on the way will bring my yacht there. Will you go?”

“Oh! No, I will not go! It is bad enough that I am tempted. Oh, I want to go, I want to go, more than I have ever wanted anything on this earth! Another man would make it inevitable, but you will not; and in a few days I shall be battling with regrets, and hating myself the more.”

“Yes,” he said, and with little enthusiasm. “I could compel you, and you would love me the more for it; but I should not love myself. It would not be playing a fair game. I have a Puritanic conscience as an inheritance; also I have the instinct of the American to protect women--girls, perhaps, I should say; to look upon them as his chief responsibility. That is pounded into us early. And I have lived so much within myself that it would demoralize me to fall too far below my own standard--God knows, I fall below it often enough. Moreover, if I gave way to my passions you might--were our escape interrupted--suffer so terribly that it chills my blood whenever I think of it. I believe that is the one thing--the knowledge that you were in your father’s power, unable to escape--that would send me off my head. And it is necessary that I keep my head until I am able in all ways to protect you.”

XXV

“Have you noticed,” asked Alexandra of Zrinyi, as the Archduchess descended the staircase, “that our princess has, until to-night, for the past week worn only black or white?”

“Why should I notice a trifling detail like that?” asked Zrinyi sulkily. “If she look beautiful, what matters her dress?”

“You don’t deserve to be asked intelligent questions.”

Ranata was trailing down the rough old staircase, between smoking lamps almost as old, in a green velvet gown of many hues, any one of which would have enhanced the brilliancy of her skin and hair. The neck of the gown was cut squarely, and a high stiff collar of white lace rose behind her head. Her skin was bare of jewels, her hair piled high and without ornament. In her cheeks was a deep flush, her eyes sparkled restlessly, her face had escaped from its habitual repose. Her whole figure expressed vigor, energy, impatience ill-confined.