Chapter III

The King, after he had got his face washed, turned out to be not unprepossessing, although he was a little man and not young. At first, when he stepped out onto the usual red carpet laid at the station he had looked rather like an undersized chimney-sweep, and he had seemed rather bored.

“But he brightened up when he saw her,” said Clotilde. “I don’t mean that he ever loved her—he had somebody else, I believe—but since he had to marry, he must have felt that he was fortunate.”

Just what he thought of his suite nobody knows. He stood it for three days anyhow, hunting part of the time, with the Princess taking fences that endangered the royal neck, all sewed into her habit as she was, and Rudi undoubtedly setting a pace and praying for a casualty. But the King was game, although he sat down with great care in the evenings.

And on the evening of the third day he got down to business, in the old Archduke’s study. Things were not going as well as they should. The revolutionary party was at his heels, and he needed a good healthy rallying point for public sentiment.

“Such as—”

“Such as an heir,” said the King.

The Archduke, I believe, stated that both he and the Archduchess came of fertile stock.

“Yet you have had but the one child,” said the King.

“One may be childless without being sterile, sire,” said the Archduke dryly, and flicked a glance at his wife’s portrait over the fireplace.

They came to some sort of agreement finally and sent for the girl. And while they were waiting one of the King’s gentlemen brought in a leather case and put it on the desk. It lay there, unopened, when the Princess came in.

The Archduchess herself had overseen her dressing that night. They had put a net studded with pearls over her fair hair, and she wore the white dress trimmed with seed pearls. She had begged for a scarf to cover her arms and shoulders, for there was very little of the bodice, but the Archduchess had grimly refused. She had become a shop-woman showing the wares she had for sale.

Maybe something tugged at the Archduke’s heart-strings when he saw her, for he was rather gentle for once, and he took her by the arm.

“His Majesty has done us—done you—the great honour of asking for your hand in marriage,” he said.

“I have no wish to marry,” she said, frozen cold.

“Tut, tut!” said the Archduke. “The timidity of a young girl, sire.” And he closed his hand on her arm until she almost fainted. The King’s eyes narrowed.

“We will not hurry you,” he said with a little smile. “To-morrow, perhaps—”

The leather case still lay there unopened when they sent her out of the room. Later came the ball, and as if things were not bad enough already, when the ballroom doors were thrown open it was found that the candles in the great crystal chandeliers had melted from too much heat, and there were piles of wax stalagmites on the floor.

Sometime between night and the next morning the Princess agreed.

“What else could she do?” Clotilde said. “They gave her her choice of that or of going into a convent. And she was so young, only seventeen.”

The next day the leather case was opened and the King put over her head the great black pearl necklace in which Di Bicci later painted his famous portrait of her, swathed in rose tulle with the pearls a smoky grey rope that fell almost to her knees.

“She was like a dead creature,” Clotilde said. “But even then she believed Rudi would find some way out. But even Rudi failed her just then. Oh, only for a few hours, but it was almost more than she could bear.”

Rudi was only out trying to get himself killed. He was a good Catholic and he did not believe in suicide, but he had seen the pearls on her neck and he clearly perceived that she had, so to speak, sold him out. When he came back safe—damnably safe—Clotilde went to him with a message and he told her to go where he had been trying to go all day.

It was, one realises, not an original situation to that point; the usual arranged marriage of the courts, with a hot-eyed lover somewhere in the offing and a Princess who cries herself to sleep at night. Most of the Queens of Europe went from tears to tiaras and seemed to manage very comfortably thereafter. And after all, as has been said before, “_Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis_.”

But from this point the tale varies.

The King hunted and made a little love, mostly apparently to Clotilde, whom he waylaid in upper corridors and kissed every so often, and Rudi went to confession to shrive his soul for his thought against the King and brought away a trifle of information.

“My son,” said the old priest, “between a crown and a convent, what girl of seventeen would choose the church?”

Rudi apparently digested that and then went home to study the situation. And I am quite sure, although Clotilde doubts it, that it was Rudi who planned the night visit to the Gipsy encampment. It does not sound entirely spontaneous. However that may be, it is certain that on the third and last evening of the King’s visit the entire party made an excursion to the camp not far away in an oak wood.

The Gipsies seem to have been a sad lot, living in caves, with the children naked and all of them screaming and holding out their hands for money. But the King was not squeamish and insisted on going underground. The Archduke tore his beard, no doubt, but he had to follow, and he came out later on holding his nose.

But that is not important. What does matter is that in the darkness Rudi and the Princess slipped away and were married by the Gipsy chief. A Gipsy marriage, of course, but to each of them it was a real one. Rudi never accepted any other version on it.

“It was not a real marriage in the eyes of the church, of course. But they had taken certain vows in the presence of witnesses, and of course, to them—”

They had been married “over the tongs” and the only real ceremony apparently they had conducted themselves; just taking each other for better or for worse. The Gipsies seem to have constituted witnesses mainly, and local colour. There was a man with the Princess’s handkerchief on a pole as a symbol of purity, and another sawing away violently on a fiddle, and all around were the dark-skinned women who resembled the lilies of the field only insomuch as they neither toiled, spun nor washed.

“The Gipsies thought it was a great joke, but—” Her voice trailed off. It was a moment before she resumed her sewing.

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” she said. “But when two people love like that and go through a ceremony of marriage before God, it _is_ marriage, I think. And if you had seen their faces you would have felt as I did, that it was consecrated.”

Before the King left he had formally proposed for the Princess and the Duke had accepted. He went away, red carpet again, special train and everything, including his four gentlemen, his gentlemen’s valets and his own four. The bows were thriftily taken off the pictures, the new Brussels carpet had a dust cloth laid over it and a new era set in the old palace.

Instead of coming down now in the evenings to play the piano and be interrogated, the Princess was carefully instructed in the etiquette of the court.

“Again and again,” said Clotilde, “her mother would make her enter the room. She taught her to sit, to rise—no play was ever so rehearsed.”

She went through with it, poor lamb, waiting all the time for Rudi to perfect his plans for flight; stood while her gowns were fitted to her, so tight that she could scarcely breathe and so heavy that she wilted under them. Messengers arrived bringing the King’s gifts to her. A complete toilet service of gold and ivory was one of them, but she would never use it.

And then, on the day the date of the wedding was set and the Archduke sent for her to tell her, Rudi was thrown from his horse and broke his leg.

Everything was gone in a minute.

She had only just got the word when she was sent for. Clotilde was with her and she said:

“This is the end.”

She went down the great marble staircase, hung with its Gombaut and Macée tapestries, now in the French museum at Sainte Lô, and went into the library. There she stood, very white and trembling, while she was told.

“The date,” said the Duke, “is such and such.”

“I am sorry, father,” she said, very composed now, “I should have told you before, but—”

“But what?” said the Duke, suddenly rigid.

“I am already married.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have told you. I have married Rudi.”

Even to Clotilde I believe the Princess never told exactly what followed. There seems to have been no noise, for there were people about, in anterooms and corridors. And for the Archduke’s excuse there is the fact that he had been about to ally himself with one of the strong kingdoms and that he needed such alliance.

But the fact remains that the Princess was carried to her room sometime later with a dislocated wrist, and that it still has the faintest possible distortion. When she was allowed to get about again, under rigid supervision, Rudi had been carried off somewhere, and later on he was sent to Africa to join a regiment there.

There never really had been a hope for them.