Chapter XV: Part II: I (10)

His Majesty’s ruddy face deepened in hue, but he had too difficult a task to accomplish to permit himself the luxury of a personal sensation. He had steeled his heart against pity; to give himself up to anger was unworthy, and he brushed the emotion aside. He would have been glad to see his daughter happy, but the stoicism of lonely majesty had been immutably set in his case by the many and agonizing personal experiences which he had weathered into a healthy and tolerable old age. Princes were born to earthly martyrdom tempered by much casual consolation. If their women were forced to play their part without the compensations, that was the decree of God, who made kings, and they must suffer and make no complaint. As a rule they did, and it was the manifest duty of him who was divinely permitted to govern to see that they found no opportunity to do otherwise. “You are overwrought, I fear,” he said tactfully. “Did you sleep well after your pilgrimage?”

“Perfectly. May I ask whom your Majesty has considered as a son-in-law?”

The Emperor made a slight motion that in a person of less graceful dignity might have been mistaken for a squirm. He had no doubt of the wisdom of his choice--his own choice he believed it to be--for his relative, if stern and unbending, a disciplinarian of the first rank, was neither brutal nor cruel, nor, if met with a discreet submission, unamiable. The idea of handing over his potential daughter to this Gibraltar among husbands, who had responded with enthusiasm to the invitation to marry a beautiful and wealthy princess, had taken full possession of the apprehensive mind of the old monarch; but he had not planned to break the name until after the right amount of preparation. He had anticipated that Ranata would dissolve into tears and perhaps more tempestuous emotions, under cover of which he could retreat, to communicate in writing the fulness of her fate. But there was no sign of a tear in the large angry eyes transfixing him, and her full fine mouth, with its short upper lip and unsatisfied corners, looked as if a sob had never shaken it.

“Well?” she asked.

There was nothing for it but to plump out the name. Even were he willing to gain time by asserting that the man had not yet been chosen, he knew that she would detect the lie and place him at an immediate disadvantage. He answered stolidly,

“Aloys Franz--”

“What?” she stood up and stared down upon him as if she were repeating his statement to herself and endeavoring to place it in connection with her brain. In a moment the blood rose hotly to her hair, even her eyes looked bloodshot. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Oh!” and then she walked to the window.

It was an opportune moment for retreat, but there was more to be said; she was calm, and the sooner the whole task was finished the better.

“Perhaps you will understand why I think it best you should not return to Budapest,” he said gently. “It is well for many reasons that this wedding take place at once, and it is my duty to expose you to no further temptation. It can be given out that your trousseau detains you here, or Sarolta’s illness--”

Ranata wheeled about and faced him. For the first time in her life she was ugly.

“And have you really deluded yourself,” she asked with an ominous calm, “that you will marry me to that man?--or to any one else?”

The Emperor rose then and faced her. War was declared, and he knew where he stood. There was no better mettle in Europe than his.

“You will marry Aloys Franz,” he said.

Again Ranata laughed, and for the moment she looked hideous. “I shall not,” she said. “And you should know by this time what stuff I am made of.”

“I have not had a doubt of your resistance. I have as little of my firmness of purpose. You have not been sufficiently disciplined. A princess marries whom and when her father and sovereign dictates. You were my youngest, in many ways exceptional, and very much alone. I have been more indulgent, more lax, than I should. But that is over. From this moment you will recognize that I am your emperor as well as your father.”

“We are no longer in the Middle Ages, nor yet in the middle of the last century. Your subjects are free to marry whom they please, or to remain unmarried if they choose.”

“Constitutions have shorn monarchs of too much power over their subjects, but in his own family the power of an emperor is as absolute as it ever was. To the law you would have no appeal did I choose to practise upon you the tortures of the Inquisition here in my palace, to starve you in a cell, to cause you to disappear forever from human sight. Please understand once for all that you are my property, given into my care by Almighty God; and for your own salvation and for the honor of my house I shall do what I think best with you.”

“And if I still refuse?”

“You will remain a prisoner in these rooms until you consent. Your servants will attend to every want, you will have the society of Maria Leopoldina, and you may take your exercise in the corridor. You will see no one else. There will be a guard day and night at each end of the corridor. If you make any attempt to bribe these guards, or to communicate with any one in the court-yard, you will be moved elsewhere and deprived of exercise. But I do not wish to be forced into undue severity, and you may remain here so long as you transgress no rules.”

“Good God!” she exclaimed. “And this is the twentieth century! Have I heard aright? Am I a prisoner under an armed guard? Am I more helpless in the eyes of the law than the meanest of your subjects? May any illiterate peasant woman seek redress in the courts of justice while a princess of the realm, whose supreme advantages have set her apart from mankind, is but a chattel among the possessions of her father? I suppose I have known this. But I have managed to surround myself with a different atmosphere. But you--you are a man of the world, and all your faculties are still alert--do you mean to tell me that you have not outgrown the barbarism of the past?”

“You may call it by what name you will. I shall go now, and you will meditate--”

But Ranata had flashed between him and the door, and he knew that he could not pass her. He was deeply annoyed that he had not retreated in time, but he stood immobile, looking coldly into her distorted face.

“No,” she said hoarsely, but still retaining an appreciable measure of self-control; “you will not leave this room until you have heard the truth for once. If you are no longer my father but my tyrant, then from this moment I am your most rebellious subject and nothing more. And I would that I could open my veins and drain out every drop of royal blood. Has it ever occurred to you, sir, that the great enlightened masses not only in America but here in central Europe regard us not with the hatred of half a century ago, but with impatience and contempt; that they look upon us as anomalies, anachronisms, ornamental nuisances, and do not rise to let out our blood on the guillotine only because they are well aware of the peaceful disintegration, the irresistible rising of the tide of independence and liberty? If your people love you--here, not in Hungary!--it is for your personal qualities, not because you represent an idea which, in their estimate of life and civilization, they have relegated to the past, with crinolines and Bath chairs. Do you suppose that what loyalty you enjoy will be transferred to the Heir? You know it will not. That alone is proof enough that the people are carelessly--perhaps unconsciously--determined to have what they want--monarchy, only if it happen to suit them at the moment. There is only one monarchy on the face of the earth enlightened enough to grasp this fact before it is too late, and that is England. There alone is monarchy not ridiculous--and not threatened. What do you suppose is the meaning of the immense and undaunted increase of socialism in Germany? What is the meaning of the incalculable and persistent forces of disintegration in this empire? Look at Italy. At Spain. At Turkey. At Russia--that dares not sleep. Only the insignificant little monarchies are comparatively safe from themselves, being occupied with apprehension of the greater. Even in the United States the unsatisfied tide of liberty is rising. McKinley was not shot by a lunatic, a fanatic, nor by a member of any deadly organization; the assassin was merely one of the millions of dissatisfied poor in the richest country on earth, where he saw liberty and justice becoming as paralytic as in Europe. Did the portent of that assassination never occur to you? And with this spirit abroad in the world we dare over here to play at divine rights, at being hereditary rulers of millions more enlightened than ourselves--we--pygmies--marionettes--who may be born as foolish as the last Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, who thought that all eagles had two heads, and yet dare to mount a throne and cry ‘I am King!’ No one has ever more devoutly tried to do what he conceived to be his inherited duty than I have done. I have, for many years, been deliberately blind. During these last months in Hungary I have _held_ the scales to my eyes lest they fall off. Last night down there in the crypt, where, if you must know, I went in the hope of finding my old idols, I lost most of those scales. To-day I have lost the last of them. If I had it in my power to do, I would give liberty and the broadest sort of constitutional government to every man that breathes. I am mortified that it took the deprivation of my own liberty to force my brain to acknowledge the truth. I would rather I had been less human and welcomed the truth as the result of much deep and intelligent meditation. But to expect the godlike of one of us of royal blood is beyond reason, and I am thankful that I am not too dense to receive illumination from any source. But I loathe my blood. I hope to God I may live to see every monarch now alive a useful member of a republic and no man degraded by being forced to submit to what he had no hand in making. I am sorry to have detained and agitated you; and for any unintentional rudeness I hope your Majesty will forgive me. For you, until to-day, I have had a great respect. For what you stand for it is impossible that I should ever again have anything but the profoundest contempt. I will not detain you any longer except to repeat that you will save yourself a great deal of trouble if you give up at once this idea of marrying me to any man but the one I shall select for myself.”

She no longer looked hideous. The relief of her emotions, the tide of passion which had surged over its dam laden with the profoundest truth of the century, had carried her to the heights of her nature, and she had never been more beautiful--nor more formidable. Not so the Emperor. He was purple, and his heavy underlip trembled. But he preserved his dignity, his soldierly bearing. As she moved aside to let him pass, he bowed courteously to her without speaking and left the room.

XXXII

The Princess Sarolta, Prince Illehazy, Countess Vilma Festetics, Alexandra Abbott, and Count Zrinyi sat in agitated conclave in the palace of Buda. The Countess Piroska Zápolya was officially in bed with an attack of influenza.

The five friends sat close together in the blue drawing-room. Sarolta had related the story of the appalling interview between the Emperor and Ranata as reported to herself by a faithful maid of the Archduchess; who had almost fainted in a window-curtain. The woman had escaped to invoke the aid of the powerful Obersthofmeisterin before orders had been issued for the isolation of the Archduchess’s servants.

“There you are!” exclaimed Sarolta, who frequently expressed herself in English for the sake of its facile idiom. “God help us, what a lashing she must have given him! It was not the first, poor dear man, but I doubt if he ever had it quite so straight; for Ranata’s brain would always preserve her from the usual feminine tangents. But--but--our poor princess! she is a prisoner! Do you realize it? He will keep his word, the more rigorously as he now no doubt thinks she is mad. And _Aloys Franz_! If I didn’t love Ranata, nothing would amuse me more than to look on at his attempts to reduce her to submission. But the situation is not humorous; it is tragic! What in Heaven’s name are we to do to help her? We shall not be able even to get a word of consolation to her; not one of us will be allowed to visit her; she will receive no letters; she will be shut up for months, perhaps, with _Maria Leopoldina_, for whom I feel an even more acute sympathy than for herself. And she, with that active brain, that nervous temperament--no exercise, no society, no change--Good God! she may lose her reason.”

“That need not concern us,” said Alexandra. “Nor Aloys Franz. They’ll never marry her, with or without antediluvian methods. But the rest is bad enough. Surely the Emperor will let her exercise in the riding-school. She would still be in the Hofburg and sufficiently guarded.”

“I am sure the Emperor will not hear of it. The official announcement has been made that she is suffering from a light attack of influenza--light, you will understand, that neither suspicion nor too much sympathy may be awakened. If she went as far as the riding-school there would be too many people in the secret. She is confined to five rooms and a corridor, and there I am afraid she will stay. Refractory princesses have been shut up since the beginning of kings, and will be until all the kings have gone to the guillotine. Poor dear!”

“I shall telegraph to my brother at once. We have a code. He will get her out. Be sure of that. If he doesn’t he may look upon his life as a failure. He will, however.”

“Would it not be better,” suggested Prince Illehazy, “if Mr. Abbott did not take any step in the matter? It might create a scandal and do the Princess a lasting injury. She has a severe ordeal before her, but I think there is no doubt she will win. Her will is stronger than the King’s. I think it would be better to leave the matter to Time.”

“Time!--a woman like Ranata for six months, a year, in confinement and uncertainty! She must be got out at once, and there is only one person who can make the deliverance final. Now I am going to say something that will make you all jump. My brother intends to marry Ranata.”

They did jump, with the exception of Vilma.

“_Ach so!_” Sarolta’s tones were guttural with irony, but her fingers shook slightly as she lit a cigar.

“But, mademoiselle,” murmured Prince Illehazy politely, “you know, of course, that it is impossible. No one can sympathize more than I with the romance of youth, and I have been deeply interested; but marriage--between an Archduchess of Austria and Princess of Hungary and, pardon me, an American--you who know your Europe must surely have discouraged Mr. Abbott.”

“I never set myself impossible tasks. Fessenden will marry Ranata; of that I have not the slightest doubt. I know now that I have always anticipated it--and so has my father!--although as far as I am concerned I thought of it until lately as a dream, rather. I know now that it was a belief, and founded on my intimate knowledge of both and of their fitness for each other; as well as on that very knowledge of Europe which assures me that if I live I shall see greater social revolutions than the marriage of an American with a princess of the blood. You are dumfounded because you know Europe only. Go over and live in the United States for a while and you will come back with the future in your brain as well as the past.”

“I have never been in the United States, but I think this strange love-affair is the most beautiful thing in the world, and I would help them if I could!”

It was Vilma who spoke, and she was leaning forward with her hands gripping the arms of her chair. The grayish pallor of her skin had never been more noticeable, and the lines about her mouth were tense. Not only had every nerve been on edge since Ranata’s departure two days ago, but she was possessed by the exaltation of the martyr; she was not going to the stake for the ideals of the proud aristocracy of her ancient country, but in sacrificing those ideals in the hope to compass the happiness of two exceptional beings she felt that she had made good her claim to the martyr’s crown. But the time had come when her morbidity might prove more useful than the healthy impatience of Alexandra, who had little talent for intrigue; and who looked upon Vilma as one of the unfortunate products of a too conservative aristocracy.

“Princess,” she continued, appealing to her chief, “you do not approve, of course. But you would not betray us if we attempted to help her?”

Sarolta bit the end of her cigar. “I would do all I could to help her out of this difficulty; but connive at her marriage with an American--never! I have outgrown romantic nonsense; and I am also a loyal subject of my king, although I do think he is an--”

“But what you did not know, dear Princess, you would not feel obliged to discover, now that you are no longer Obersthofmeisterin,” said Vilma wheedlingly. “Why not leave it to her? You do not believe, do you, that she would make such a marriage?”

“I do not. There at least my faith is unshaken.”

“Then take me to Vienna with you, and close your eyes if I try to communicate with her. Only I can, for I am quite unknown in Vienna, insignificant in appearance, and if the King has ever seen me he would not recognize me. I cannot go unless you take me, but go I must.”

Sarolta, whose heart, as the astute Vilma well knew, was aching, appeared to consider deeply. Finally she shrugged her shoulders. “I cannot see what you could accomplish; but you might let her see you occasionally in the Franzensplatz and give her a little comfort. The rest of us cannot go near it. Alex, of course you will return with me as soon as I have closed the palace. Zrinyi, I think you and Vienna had better be strangers for the present.”

“I go to Vienna the day you do,” announced Zrinyi. “The King, on second thoughts, will do nothing more to irritate Hungary. If he ordered me out of Vienna I should return here and tell the whole story. Molnár would go off his head and demand the liberty and return of the Princess as the price of peace in the country. In any case he could set the tongues of all Europe wagging, and the King would find himself outwitted. He is shrewd enough to know this--or his ministers are. They will pursue a very moderate and conservative course outside the Hofburg. After all, this is the twentieth century.”

“Who would have thought it!” said Alexandra. “Will you come with me, Count, while I write my telegram, and then send it yourself?”

“I would take it to Berlin if I could get there as quickly,” said Zrinyi gallantly.

“Count,” murmured his tormentor as they left the room, “you are a brick. I am a grateful soul. I feel uncommonly like rewarding you.”

XXXIII

For twenty-four hours Ranata’s brain whirled to no machinery but her wrath. To that succeeded an energetic desire to escape. All her prejudices and separate ambitions had gone down in that final moment of disillusion, and she was determined to marry Fessenden Abbott as soon as she was beyond the reach of her father. But her brain, fertile as it was, and abnormally active, could conceive no method of leaving unobserved that great palace of many corridors never for a moment deserted. She was forced to relinquish her intention to bribe the guards, for there were constantly three together, and it would seem that they were changed every half-hour. To assume the disguise of a servant was equally impracticable, for not one of those in attendance upon her reached her shoulder, and they were as closely watched as herself. Her rooms were not high above the ground, but a guard paced beneath her window day and night, and the guard-room was opposite. She was in the very heart of a great European capital preeminent in science and art, the civilized virtues and vices, not a hundred yards from cabs and crowded streets, and no mountain fortress could enclose her more securely.

When Maria Leopoldina arrived, after a delay welcome to both, Ranata greeted her with some warmth, but frankly asked her to remain in her own rooms as much as possible. This the duenna was more than willing to do. Not only had she returned to her exacting post from her pleasant retirement with a reluctance she dared not express to her sovereign, but she had a very considerable understanding of her former charge, and was by no means unsympathetic. She recognized the necessity of drastic measures in so lamentable a state of a princess’s affections and temper, and she should do her duty cost her what it might; but she would obey the letter of her instructions only, and leave the prisoner such freedom as she still could find within her own walls.

And then the days dragged themselves out. Ranata saw no one but her cousin and servants, received no message from the world; even Maria Leopoldina was not permitted the solace of a newspaper. Ranata seldom sat down, but moved about until all her body ached with weariness, pausing every few moments to look down upon the Franzensplatz, through the sheltering lace of the curtain, in the hope that Fessenden Abbott would saunter through with intent to give her courage. If she tried to forget her plight in a book she would fling it down presently and fly to the window lest she miss him.

In these first hours she was too hard for lovers’ regrets, so wroth was she at the insult put upon her individuality, and so great her astonishment that with all the intellect and character of which she had vaunted herself she was as helpless to move in behalf of her own destiny, as poor in resource, in these primitive circumstances to which her father and sovereign had reduced her, as any little fool of the Middle Ages. Although she had been warned by her opportunities of close observation against the devouring and repulsive selfishness of those who pushed the _culte du moi_ to its modern limits, yet few women had so proudly developed their individuality, few had so jealously insisted upon the right of the brain to its own thoughts, of the character to develop in its own way and as far as human limitations would permit. If she had until her visit to Hungary been submissive to the laws of her position it had been because she had deliberately chosen submission, and aloofness, as her part, as her highest duties to her house; not because she stood in the slightest awe of her father, or recognized his right to direct her thoughts and conduct. It is doubtful if she could have loved Fessenden Abbott had she not recognized in him a spirit as free as her own, and an enlightenment and a sympathetic understanding which would never seek to change nor control her. She had found a mate, not a master, and both being the extreme products of their century, their prospects of a lifelong desire for partnership exceeded those in the great restless sea of awakened intelligence between the highest type and the commonplace. Ranata, in more passionate hours of longing and anguish, had felt the possibilities she relinquished, rather than grasped them with her reason, but now she knew their full significance, and the knowledge helped her to deeper indignation of the mediæval conditions into which she had abruptly been thrust.

The days passed and the lover gave no sign that he was as distraught as the prisoner. There are times in life when one lives very fast. The first forty-eight hours of her imprisonment consumed the mental energies of months. As the first excitement decreased, and with it something of the novelty of her situation, her mind was free again for thoughts and dreams she had been half glad to forget, so many were the pangs they had held. And in the train of love came all the doubts and tragic conceptions with which a woman cursed with imagination never fails to torment herself. The women for whom men would most willingly die--if there be yet that spirit abroad in the world--women who in the end are most sure to discard the still ardent lover, often suffer in their imaginary tragedies as intensely as their more constant and less valued sisters in their hopeless realities. Ranata was not the woman to love and tire, but her imagination was the least controlled of her faculties. She descended into the very depths of depression and convinced herself that Fessenden Abbott had taken her at her word and returned to America before any one had suspected her imprisonment and sent him warning. (The faithful maid had not dared to confess her eavesdropping.) She might be confined here until she lost her reason, and he would drown his thoughts of her in the hideous details of business, or in those great schemes of his, remembering her only as a purified spirit; likely enough, wearying of the cold picture. She forgot her ideals, even her instinctive knowledge of him, and treated his vows with cynicism. What man in this practical modern world--and the world was practical and modern outside of the Hofburg--would be faithful to the woman hidden forever from his sight? He would marry, of course, and forget her; why, indeed, should he not? And what if he did? There were times when she hated him, when in the prolonged contemplation of his commonplace infidelity she despised him as unworthy of her, and hardened her heart until she doubted if it ever would melt again, even if he suddenly appeared and took her in his arms.

These crises in a woman’s brain are very unfortunate, and when men are wiser they will study to prevent them. After all, it is the psychical experience that tells, not the visible cause, and the scars may be deep and callous. In this case poor Fessenden was helpless, and Ranata had still felt and known so little that she had elasticity enough to survive several such crises without the worst effects; but if life had added bitterness to her store of experience she might have come out of her ordeal with her best prospect for happiness blasted.

Time cured this mood; but the passing of doubt and the restoration of the lover to favor helped her little to serenity. She recalled every look, the tones of his voice, every moment they had snatched together, all that he had taught her. She remembered every trick of speech and expression, the lighter but still personal habit they had fallen into of sitting apart for a few minutes after the tea-hour, while the others were drinking their coffee in one of the reception-rooms, at the opera and theatre, or riding to the Schwabenberg in the early morning. These had become established habits, and she regretted them almost as intensely as the more concentrated moments; she had known to the full the tantalizing sweetness of the intimate understanding in a crowd.

And she recalled all she knew of him through the stories he had told her of himself in the years before they had met. They revealed him in many phases, and she had often lingered on them when alone. But there was one that now seemed to be always in her brain, to rise vividly in the brief moments when she was not struggling with a passion of grief, of regret, above all striving to tear her mind from the uncertainty, the maddening inability to act.

It was a brief graphic story of an adventure in a mountain-pass in Venezuela, when with three or four men he had been set upon by half a score of the threatened dictator’s followers. The case had been desperate, there had been a few moments when he had never expected to see a wider sky again, and in those moments it was not so much he that had fought as Life itself. His pistol emptied, stabbed, shot, his clothing almost off his back, he was dragged to and fro on the rough mountain-road, hacking, struggling, hating, not a harking in him to his old love of the fight in that gasping tortured wrestle with Death himself; possessed only by the furious determination of Life to persist, to win against the enemy that never for an instant sleeps on its trail--so that the wonder is man lives a month from birth. At the end it had seemed to him that he saw the two ancient enemies at each other’s throats.

Fessenden’s face had been composed enough as he told the story, but her imagination had visioned it set and desperate, pictured the swollen chords of his neck, the muscles on his half-naked and bleeding body bulging with rage and resistance. His eye had glazed as Keene arrived and put the assassins to flight, and he had sunk into unconsciousness in bitterness and resentment, believing that he was dying. None of his stories of brilliant and reckless adventure had stirred her like this glimpse into his primeval depths, depths which in the lower types make for ruin, and when rarely in the ken of the great forces of soul and brain are chief among the main-springs of a man’s conquest over Life. The oftener this picture recurred to her, the face convulsed, or indomitable and grim, of the man she understood so well, the more was she persuaded that something had happened to still his energies, or he would have made her a sign before this. It had not needed that story to convince her that his courage would never fail him, but it now served the purpose of suggesting a similar strait where a wild revolt against death availed him nothing.

It needed only a shock to send the blood to her head and deliver her nerves from the control of her will, which had struggled hard to keep in office. The shock came, and Maria Leopoldina was the apologetic medium. She entered Ranata’s sitting-room on the sixth morning of the imprisonment with a newspaper, and pointed to a marked paragraph. The news item stated that the famous American, Herr Abbott, had sailed on his yacht from Trieste for New York on the previous day.

Then it was that the blood flew to Ranata’s head and stayed there. It disorganized her will, almost her powers of consecutive thought. A moment of forgetfulness and the tide of feeling, of terrified emotion, poured upward again, shaking her body and racking her nerves. She slept but a few hours at night, waking with a load of despair and terror in her brain. Her desperate efforts at self-control, her prayers for strength, were of no avail; for it must be remembered that mental suffering is a physical thing after all, psychical as may be the heights it is flung upon, and, until it has spent itself, as little to be controlled as a fever of the body. There was a constant effort in her throat to gasp, and moments of such utter and tumultuous despair that it seemed to her she saw straight into the soul of her brother during his last tormented moments. For it is in such depths of mental suffering, when the passions are in absolute control of the brain, and the victim if not mad might as well be, that life is taken. The strength in Ranata’s soul fought dumbly and persistently for mastery, and won in the end, but a weaker woman, with imagination and passions as strong, would have killed herself.

Finally she demanded of Maria Leopoldina--blissfully ignorant of the tragedies enacting within the hard exterior of her charge--a sleeping-potion; and the stewardess, when she returned with it, brought also the information that as a hasty marriage would undoubtedly cause a scandal exactly similar to that which had entertained Europe upon the informal exit into matrimony of the late wife of the Archduke Aloys Franz, it had been determined that the ceremony should not take place until two months hence. The official announcement of the engagement would be made presently, however, and until the day of the wedding she must remain in her rooms.

“Why, now that Mr. Abbott has gone?” asked Ranata. “Why deprive me of my liberty when I could make no use of it?”

“I cannot say, my dear,” answered Maria Leopoldina. “It would not take him long to come back, you know; and then you have not given your formal consent to marriage with Aloys.”

“That is a point I had quite forgotten,” said Ranata dryly. “I hope my father and my prospective husband are not unduly impatient.”

On the following day, after the surcease of the sleeping-powder, and the inevitable reaction from many days of torment, she felt almost light-hearted and frivolous, and wondered if it were possible to suffer like that more than once in a lifetime. Passing a window her eye was idly attracted by the shabby figure of a tourist. It was a bright winter’s day, and visitors to the great capital came to look at the fine bronze of old Emperor Franz and the gilded wall where the drawbridge had been. Ranata envied them deeply, nameless as no doubt they were--she had a vague idea that all sight-seers were a composite with a number--for they had their precious liberty, no doubt belonged to such free and happy countries as England and America.

This insignificant little woman carried a Baedeker, which she read industriously, walking round and round the statue, with but an occasional upward glance at the work of art. Alexandra had told Ranata of tourists who read their Baedekers on the Rhine, forgetting to look at the historic monuments described, and she watched this illustration with some amusement. Suddenly her brows met, and she drew closer to the window. There was something oddly familiar in the little deliberate steps, in the fashion of opening and closing the book. And this tourist had been here on other days, when her brain was too surcharged to piece impression to thought! In a moment the girl paused with her back to the window, and, raising her hand, nervously twisted a curl on the right of her neck. It was Vilma Festetics.

She turned, her curious tourist eye roving over the ugly wall of the palace, concealing unimaginable splendors! She even sighed, and let her mouth fall with discontent. Ranata shook the edge of the curtain. Vilma came forward laggingly, her eyes on her book. The guard was inspecting the peculiar antics of another tourist, who had a bulge beneath his coat. When Vilma was directly beneath the window Ranata threw it open and leaned out.

“He has not gone,” said Vilma distinctly, “and he wants your answer before he proceeds further.”

And Ranata answered as distinctly: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

It was all over in an instant. Vilma had shot through the archway and mingled with the throng in the Michaelerplatz and Ranata had closed her window before the astounded guards realized they had been outwitted.

Ranata sat down to await the consequences of her act. Her heart sang, and she did not care in the least what they might be. Indeed, closer imprisonment, probably a change of quarters, was the worst she had to fear; her father was not benighted enough to put her in solitary confinement, nor even on bread and water. She wondered at her doubts, at her facile acceptance of a news item that no doubt had been inserted by order of the Emperor. She knew now that Fessenden had made his plans and that he would not fail. She looked back in amazement at the power and instinct of woman to torment herself, and she also felt a throb of satisfaction that she should not grow old and ugly in the course of a month, as she had fully expected to do. Finally she shed tears of wondering gratitude, and for a few moments felt as humble as a man could wish.

* * * * *

It was not until two days later that Maria Leopoldina announced herself to the Archduchess at an early hour, and with an air of deep depression imparted the information that they were to leave Vienna on the following morning.

“I infer that we are bound for the country,” said Ranata smiling. “It is unfortunate that you should hate it as much as I love it. Cannot some other trustworthy duenna be found?”

The Obersthofmeisterin shook her head with gloomy pride. “How many people has his Majesty had reason to trust? I may not be as brilliant at Sarolta, but I shall live and die in the confidence of my sovereign. And as I have borne so many crosses in this life, I may perhaps hope for compensation in the next.”

“Where there will be no kings?”

“I see no fault in our august relative,” said Maria Leopoldina hurriedly.

“I should not tell him if you did. Where are we going?”

“That, I deeply regret to say, I am not permitted to tell you until we are in the train. But we are going not only because you have had the misfortune to incur the royal displeasure, but because, as you are not to be married immediately, his Majesty fears for your health if you are confined too long in-doors.”

Ranata drew a long breath. “To live out of doors again! Even alone it will be the next best thing to the Atlantic Ocean on a yacht.”

“What?” demanded the stewardess sharply.

“Oh, you will not have to go to sea with me; and you will be rid of me sooner than you think.”

On the following morning, Ranata, accompanied only by Maria Leopoldina, three officers of the Emperor’s household, and her servants, left Vienna, not in the Emperor’s private car but in ordinary railway carriages reserved for her use. She wore the plainest of her travelling-frocks, nor was there anything in the appearance of her modest suite to attract attention; and in the heavy fog of daybreak even the mounted escort that guarded her to the station passed unnoticed.

When Vienna was an hour behind them Maria Leopoldina informed the prisoner that they were bound for the Adriatic, for the castle of Miramar, built by Maximilian several years before his departure for Mexico. The information gave Ranata pleasure, for she had never seen the beautiful home from which her uncle had sailed to his romantic and ignominious fate. Her father and mother had avoided it since long before her birth, but she knew that the castle was as comfortable as it was magnificent, and that there were grounds in whose labyrinths she could walk for hours without the monotony of repetition. Suddenly she had an inspiration.

“Did my father order Mr. Abbott’s yacht to leave Trieste?” she asked.

“Ah!--well, it can do no harm--he did.”

“Where is it?”

“That I do not know. I think his Majesty has not inquired--so long as it is not in Austrian waters.”

“Does my father expect to keep my departure, my residence at so conspicuous a spot as Miramar, a secret?”

“That will not matter. There will be an official announcement made that you are gone to the sea to recuperate from an attack of the influenza, and a man-of-war has been ordered to Trieste; it will anchor off the castle. The guard in the castle and grounds has been quadrupled from the garrison at Trieste. Moreover--I will tell you all, as it can do no harm--Mr. Abbott has given his _parole d’honneur_ that he will make no attempt to carry you off; he wished you to be removed to the country, it seems. He has had the audacity to ask your hand of his Majesty. I suppose he is of unsound mind, poor young man.”

And Maria Leopoldina had the profound satisfaction of writing to her sovereign and cousin that evening that his daughter had received this proof of American absurdity and presumption with a peal of laughter which had warmed her own heart, heavy with responsibility, and with sympathy for his most gracious majesty.

XXXIV

The Emperor of Austria, the Emperor of Germany, Mr. Abbott, and Fessenden Abbott sat in secret and informal conclave in a small audience-chamber in the Hofburg. The host sat behind a table between two high and heavy golden candlesticks. The Emperors, erect in their uniforms, were imposing figures. They had the free supple upright carriage of men whose lives have been more than half passed in the saddle, and their eyes sparkled with the evidence of exercise and fresh air, regular habits, and systematic care. Mr. Abbott, in a frock-coat, was huddled in a perpendicular chair of crimson velvet and gilded oak, in a vain endeavor to make himself comfortable, and surreptitiously consuming tabloids; suffering in the stomach he had failed to treat as a brother the tortures of the damned. He looked with envy at the older Emperor who had been born some twenty years before himself, had endured enough public cares and private castigations to kill half a dozen Americans, and looked more vigorous than many in their youth. It was even possible that he might outlive the young man who aspired to be his son-in-law; toward whom his eyes, in spite of his will, wandered in the fascination of a shock from which he found himself unable to recover.

It was now a fortnight since he had been made aware that nothing less was asked of him than that he should give his daughter in marriage to a scion of a country not only devoid of every tradition of royalty, but of an hereditary aristocracy; and while he was still stunned and dully alarmed for what he conceived to be his failing wits, this demand had been backed up by an offer which had awakened him, it is true, but, he having outlived the age of romance and enthusiasm, had by no means met with favor, nor even credulity. To avoid war in any form was the final ambition of his life, and he was proud of his position as keeper of the peace of central and eastern Europe. On the other hand, he admitted that were he forty years younger he would doubtless have grasped any reasonable opportunity to rid Europe of the governments of Russia and Turkey, civilize and give happiness to those two countries, estimable enough in themselves, and mount to a place in history high above the mistakes and disasters of his unfortunate reign. But he was old, and with the selfishness of the old had long since resolved that he would close his reign in peace could it be done without dishonor. As for the inventions, they seemed to him as chimerical as the prospective telegraph did to his forefathers, as the telephone would seem to an Esquimaux. Moreover, that the restless and uncertain quantity who claimed him as his “fatherly friend” was the one from whom the astounding proposition came, was enough to fill his bosom to repletion with distrust; the more especially as the invention was the property of an American notoriously the German’s friend. The Emperor took little interest in American history or affairs, but it happened that he knew a good deal about Fessenden Abbott; not only through the intimacy of Alexandra with his daughter, nor yet through an acquaintance of long standing with Mr. Abbott--for whom he had a very considerable respect--but because of the young man’s menacing exploit in South America, his establishment of certain and apparently impregnable industries in Europe, and his reputation as a manipulator of men. No doubt he was the only man in his raw country who would have dared so far as to love a princess of royal blood, much less have had the incomprehensible audacity to bargain for her hand; but of all men in any objectionable republic whatsoever, the Emperor-King knew of no one to whom under severest stress he would longer hesitate to give any sort of recognition. He was aware of young Abbott’s principles and theories; they had been hammered into his smarting ears by the only one of his children who had been dowered to the full with the haughty and intolerant spirit of her race; and he looked upon him as a menace to the best that was left in the world. The wealth of these two men appalled him, albeit he was the richest monarch in Europe; and as he listened once more to the description of the incredible inventions and their certainties, he found himself staring at the little old man in the chair and the vigorous restless young man standing by the window much as a half-dazed man watches the approach of a land cyclone, whirling houses, people, and trees in its funnel.

He had been astounded that one of his generals, whom he had sent to Berlin to witness the experiments, had returned convinced, and advocating war; and he had been still more astonished and upset when, in the formal consultation which at the insistence of the German Emperor he had held with his cabinets, he found that to a man they were for accepting the offer of the American. During the past week his ears had rung to no tune but the glorious finish of his reign, the inestimable service he had it in his power to bestow upon Christianity and Europe, the sure future of his Dual Monarchy--which the intoxicating knowledge of its greatness would solidify. The only thing they had stumbled over was the condition; for the Emperor was no more conservative than his aristocracy, and the idea of allying the most exclusive monarchy in the world with the most blatant and dangerous of republics, that moreover which had recently whipped one of the ancient states of Europe, was a huge pill for them to swallow. Had it not been that they all felt that Europe would be well rid of this particular princess--even Königsegg, with this alternative--it is doubtful if, no matter what their reason for approving this projected war, they would have opened their batteries upon the Emperor But as it was, the old sovereign, who had permitted these many years his advisers to do so much of his thinking had an irritated subconsciousness of being trapped, and hardly realized yet that he had actually gone so far as to grant this private audience and to permit the royal countenance to shine upon a manifest impossibility.

It was notable that the Emperor of Germany, in spite of his warm friendship for Fessenden, had drawn his chair close to his host’s, and for the moment was in fuller sympathy with him; an unconscious manifestation of that _esprit de corps_ which exists among great rulers, no matter what their differences. Fessenden felt this but did not resent it; but he also felt that it left him practically alone, his father’s faculties being necessarily bent to introspection; but the isolation merely put him on his mettle, and he had fought too many battles single-handed to feel any faintness of spirit. Even he did not compare favorably in freshness with the two Emperors, for he had known too many anxious hours in the past three weeks, too many sleepless nights; but his temper was now cast in iron.

“Your general, as well as the Prussian generals who have witnessed the experiments, are satisfied that failure is impossible,” he said, having finished the description of the inventions, which, like all great inventions, were simple enough. “It will be the first time in the history of the world that a war will have commenced with no uncertainty whatever as to the issue.”

The Austrian Emperor answered with a German proverb, the equivalent of “There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.”

“We include no bunglers in our calculations, sir,” said Fessenden dryly. “Although every precaution will be taken against their admittance in the first place.”

The Emperor turned to his brother of Germany, who answered promptly: “I will confess that I entertained the identical doubts of your Majesty, at first, but I have since been fully convinced. And I am also convinced that it is our great and only chance. Sooner or later, doubtless before half a dozen years have passed, Russia will be at war with Japan. That war may involve the rest of Europe, including ourselves; and fighting for our lives perhaps instead of shaping history as we think best. Sooner still there is bound to be trouble again in Turkey, which may involve one or more of the Balkans, and if we delay we shall once more be in the periodically mortifying position of daring to do nothing for the peace of Europe, for humanity, in our fear of Russia. At present we are in the not imposing position of merely holding on to our inheritances by what my American friend would call main strength. I conceive that a sovereign has a higher duty. This great power is not given to him in the interest of his inheritance alone, although no doubt its welfare is his first duty, but as a stepping-stone to a greater power which shall benefit the human race. It is often the case, as your Majesty well knows, that a ruler may be so confined by circumstances that he can make no such attempt without causing disaster instead of benefit, but the great men of history have been alive to the great moment. I believe that ours has come, your Majesty.”

The old Emperor darted a glance at his rival and friend, as though to note if his tongue were in his cheek. He answered with the same accent of respect, however.

“I cannot fail to respond to words so stirring, your Majesty, and I need not add that my conception of the lofty duties of a ruler is precisely the same as your own. But war in any case is a stupendous calamity, if only for the loss of life it incurs. And in any conditions the added responsibilities of conquered territory are among the weightiest considerations which must always affect a ruler no longer young. In this case, with the half of Russia and Turkey and the Balkans to add to my present heavy load, I confess the prospect does not allure me! Reflect, your Majesty, that I have already a perpetual nightmare in Hungary. If I were a generation younger I might contemplate with equanimity the additional problem of sixty or seventy million more subjects clamoring for constitutions, but not now!”

William did not reply that he would gladly relieve his august friend of all but his countenance; he answered quickly.

“It will be our part to civilize these people, to give them the benefit of the reforms they have long been promised and never granted. That will keep them quiet for a while. When they reach the stage where enough has begotten a desire for more, then we can deal with them by another method for which we will have the inspiration at the right moment. And in this war, your Majesty, there need be no loss of life on our side; there will of course on the other for a short time, but less by many thousands than both Turkey and Russia will cause before Europe is many years older, less than die of famine and filth every year.”