Chapter II

Up to that time nothing had been said between the lovers. In Rudi’s position it was not for him to make the first move, and the Princess was shy and uncertain. Then the King’s letter bore its first fruits, in the shape of a stout little gentleman “with pigs’ eyes.”

The Princess had been hastily put into a muslin dress with a pink sash and taken in to see him, and he had talked to her for a few minutes, appraising her all the time. She had got so nervous that she had dropped her tea-cup. The Archduchess had scolded her frightfully about it later.

“But she did not know what it was all about,” said Clotilde. “Rudi was in attendance and he suspected something, but we did not.”

I think Clotilde herself suspected Rudi of what followed. For going back to the railroad, down the mountain, the big berlin carrying the King’s envoy upset and threw the little gentleman out. There was a great to-do about it at the castle, but the beans were spilled, so to speak, and there was nothing to be done.

And within a day or two Rudi, who had had a bad fright, declared himself. The English “Mees” had a bad cold and the old people were away for the day. Rudi, it seems, simply marched up to the old schoolroom, threw open the door and stalked in. He looked first at the Princess and then at Clotilde.

“Will you allow me a moment alone with the Princess?” he said.

Clotilde got up, curtsied and went out. As she closed the door she heard Rudi, still stalking apparently, cross the room and say in a loud and desperate voice:

“If you tell me to go I shall go—by the window!”

As the window, although over a cliff, was really a sort of narrow feudal slit for archers, and as Rudi was extremely big, there seems to have been little danger. Anyhow, it was apparently not necessary for him to make the attempt. When Clotilde went back, hearing no voices, she found them in each other’s arms.

“And then?”

“I did not see much of them for a week or so. I was taken ill. But they were very happy. Like children, not looking ahead. Just—happy.”

And she had been ill! Lying in her shabby stone-floored room, with its tapestry over the door to keep out the draft, and picturing them together. Having the Princess come in now and then, glorified, to talk of Rudi. And even Rudi tiptoeing in clandestinely to press her hand and thank her. Ill, indeed.

Nothing more had been heard of the little man with the pigs’ eyes except a profound apology for the accident from the Duke and a rather irritable acceptance of it. It began to look as if the King’s eyes had been turned elsewhere for a wife, and the Duchess was most unamiable.

Then one day a photographer came to the castle and took a great many photographs of the Princess, sitting and standing, sideways and full face.

“She had a new frock for it,” said Clotilde. “The Archduchess’s maid made it. It was white tulle looped with rosebuds, and they gave her the little string of pearls she wears now. It was her first décolleté, and she was very self-conscious. But so beautiful, my dear!”

Then things began to move rather fast. Came an Ambassadress to spend a week-end.

“A terrible woman,” said Clotilde. “Tall and thin, in a red velvet draped over a green plaid. Worth had just introduced the bustle and the enormous back drapery over it, and she could only sit on the edge of a chair.”

Well, there had been a gala dinner at four in the afternoon and a ball that night, and the Ambassadress, always from the edge of her chair, watched the Princess through her pince-nez.

“She dances sweetly,” she said. “Also she has manner. Very much manner, for one so young.”

The Archduchess was extremely gratified and content, even though her own back drapery had sunk into insignificance beside the visitor’s.

The hunt was fairly in the open now, and Rudi was almost frenzied. That night after the ball, when Clotilde went back to her room, she found him there, his sabre and helmet flung on her bed, and Rudi pacing the floor.

“I was greatly alarmed,” she said. “So much gossip went on in the castle always. And then it was old and the floor boards creaked. I could hear him long before I got to my door.”

It is a curious picture; the Ambassadress and the Archduchess being disrobed somewhere, their partures being taken off—the Archduchess had had one reset for the occasion—the tight Worth dresses, so heavy that their maids could hardly lift them, being hung away, and their wearers silently plotting, dreaming; the Princess herself, too trained to submission to resist them all, perhaps standing at her window with the tulle and rosebud frock flung anywhere; and Rudi in Clotilde’s room, not caring if he roused the castle, and loudly demanding of the girl who loved him that she help him to the girl he loved.

Of course there was no answer. Clotilde, it seems, was as ignorant of the world and its ways as the Princess.

“We had been so sheltered,” she said in her quiet voice. “I had never been out on a street alone in my life. And young women were not supposed to think. A serious-minded girl had no hope of marriage in those days. Although we had heard that”—she smiled a little—“_Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis_.”

She had, it seems, been rather frightened at Rudi, so hot at first, so dogged toward the end. And he said the most frightful things about the King at the top of his voice. “Things one does not speak about,” she explained, “although they were probably true.”

Much of that, I gather, went over Clotilde’s head at the time, for she and the Princess were entirely innocent. But Rudi of course was not, and the idea of selling this pearl of his into any sort of impurity had quite maddened him.

It was almost dawn when he went away. And——

“He had forgotten his sword,” she said. “When he had gone I found it lying on my bed. I hid it in my closet and a maid found it there the next day and somehow it got about. I had a really dreadful time.”

But it did one bit of good. It convinced the Archduchess that Rudi was only interested in Clotilde. She had been rather suspicious. “So long as you are here,” she said contemptuously to Clotilde, “you will not receive young men in your bedroom. After the Princess’s marriage you can go where you will and do what you like. Sell yourself or give yourself away. It is nothing to me. But until then——”

She made a rather dreadful gesture, not improved by her appearance, and Clotilde went away.

“It was bedtime,” Clotilde said, “and the Ambassadress had told her the Viennese ladies were sleeping in masks of fresh veal to improve their complexions; she was trying it.”

She was hoping, you see, after all the lean years, to go back to court again. But one can see the old Archduke, who loved a pretty woman, coming to the door of his wife’s bedroom that night and there confronting that horrible mask!

When the ambassadress went away, still in the brown Swedish gloves without which she had never been seen during the visit, it was certain that she would return a favourable report to the King. But she said a few pertinent words to the Archduchess before she left.

“She is sweetly pretty and—virginal,” she said. “But for Heaven’s sake, madame, get her some clothes. Get Worth up here, or have him send somebody.”

The Archduchess was mean about money; and she demurred.

“It is her very simplicity——”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Ambassadress, or its equivalent. “Keep her simple, of course, but dress her. And”—she glanced at Clotilde, who was present, and lowered her voice—“get rid of that handsome what’s his name.”

“I am not worried about Rudi,” said the Archduchess, and curled her lip. She knew what she knew.

So the Ambassadress went away, carrying on her lap a new bonnet she had never had a chance to wear in that forsaken spot, and sitting well forward in the berlin to save her drapery. And somehow or other the Princess seems to have thought the affair had blown over. But not Clotilde.

“I _knew_,” she said. “Who would not, with King’s messengers coming and going and with Worth sending people to measure her for clothes! Such clothes, my dear! And how lovely she looked in them!”

Young unmarried women in those days, it appears, were forbidden the satins and velvets of their elders, but Worth made her lovely things as dainty and airy as herself. She had a frock of pink tulle, looped with festoons of white camellias and a white ball gown embroidered in seed pearls. And since she rode beautifully, there was a riding costume of dark blue, so tight that she had to be sewed into it every time she put it on. The tailor from the village came up to do it.

“And Rudi knew,” Clotilde said. “He was like a madman with me; with her, of course, he was all gentleness. But his eyes seemed sunk in his head and I think he slept very little.”

They managed to meet, of course. The Princess would take a book of poems and wander out into the woods—with Clotilde—and Rudi would be there. And then Clotilde would wander off by herself and leave them alone together.

“It was rather dull for you.”

“I always took some embroidery, my dear.”

But I wonder how much she sewed? I wonder if she did not, now and then, lie face down on the fallen leaves and fight back her own sorrow.

Gradually, too, the little Princess began to get frightened. They were doing over the royal suite, for one thing, and Clotilde particularly described the bedroom.

I think the dear soul still regarded it as exquisite. It appeared that the walls were sea-green, the furniture freshly gilded, a new Brussels carpet was laid down, and all the pictures had bows of yellow ribbon surmounting them.

The Princess began to be shadowed under the eyes, and when they were fitting on the new frocks she was rather frozen. And one day Clotilde, coming back to them in the woods, found Rudi’s head buried in her lap, and the Princess, with a new and older look in her eyes, smoothing his bright hair.

“They were so helpless,” she said. “We all were. They could not even run away. No priest would have married them. And what made it worse was not knowing what was going on. Nobody told her anything. All they could do was to wait.”

Then came word that the King would visit the Duke, coming more or less incognito. But as he brought four of his gentlemen, each with a servant, and four valets, the accommodations of the shabby old palace were pretty well taxed.