Chapter V

It is curious to see how the old Archduke played his part in the story and went on, ignorant that he had contributed to it. But he had left his mark on the child and that had its consequences.

“You remember that he had hurt her severely in his anger,” said Clotilde. “Men think their evil deeds die with them, my dear, but they do not. When the baby came it had the red imprint of his fingers on its wrist—oh, very distinct. If you were to look now—”

But otherwise this heir to the throne, prematurely born seven months after the royal marriage, was quite beautiful.

“A true love-child,” Clotilde said gently. “Have you noticed that? One can always tell the babies born in love, I think.”

And its birth changed two people.

The King, who was one of them, became quite a different person. He scarcely left the Queen’s bed-chamber for the first three days. He would come in, send away the nuns and the ladies who happened to be in attendance, and sit by her great bed for an hour at a time. Not talking. Just watching her and the child, and sometimes going to the window and gazing out complacently at the bunting and flags which draped the public square before the palace in honour of the event.

He seemed at least a foot taller at that time, too.

But it had also changed the Queen. Up to that time she had been rather like a dazed child, trapped by forces she did not even understand. But the birth had turned her into a woman.

“It does that, you see,” Clotilde explained. “Have you noticed it, my dear? Even the expression of the face is often changed.”

The more gentle he was with her the more she felt the wickedness, priest or no priest, of going on with it. But she prayed fairly steadily to die so she need not tell him.

“I think,” the King would say, judicially, surveying the infant, “that he will favour my side of the family,” or words to that effect. And all the time she could see Rudi in him; Rudi’s bent little finger, Rudi’s bright hair, Rudi’s square jaw and even the promise of Rudi’s height. He was a “long” baby.

Apparently it never entered her head not to tell him. Out of this new maturity of hers had come the conclusion that none of them could go on living a lie. She would take the child and go away somewhere, anywhere, so long as she had the boy. Perhaps they could find Rudi, and after the King had divorced her—

Strange to think how little, after all that time, she knew the King. How she failed to consider the monstrous vanity of the man. For she waited three days trying to get strength for the ordeal, and then it was too late.

It was on the third day that the great public rejoicing took place. The town and the kingdom was in carnival, and in the afternoon there was a military procession with the booming of cannon from the fortress. Then the troops were drawn up in front of the palace, and the King, in uniform and wearing all his orders, carried the baby out onto a balcony while the bands played the national hymn.

It was when the King came back in, flushed with triumph, and placed the child beside her, that she found the courage to tell him.

“He stood by the bed and listened,” Clotilde said. “The crowds outside were still cheering and the bands playing. She thought he was going to kill her, and she kept the child close to her for fear he might hurt it. But he never even spoke. When she had finished he turned and went out without a word.”

No hand will ever penetrate the veil of the next few hours. The King, Clotilde has somehow learned, shut himself into his library alone at first, and one can fancy him there, pacing the floor and stopping now and then to glance over the place, still filled with carnival figures, pierrots and pierrettes dancing, grotesque papier-mâché animals on floats, banners, confetti. Even little dogs in ballet frills.

All the rejoicing going on, and he, the King, a cuckold.

Later he got in the court physicians and the Prime Minister, and sometime that night the old Archduke was located at his hunting lodge, and brought to the palace in his hunting clothes and a state of wild alarm.

“Two days later,” Clotilde said in her quiet voice, “the court physicians announced that the Queen’s condition was not satisfactory, and it was whispered about the court that her mind was affected. Within a month they took her to the summer palace in the mountains, and later she was sent, carefully guarded, to Italy. By that time all of Europe believed that she was permanently—not sane.”

But the King kept the child.

One can see his problem, I think. The cheers of his subjects still ringing in his ears; the sight of him with his heir, proud and exultant on his balcony, still fresh in their minds. And as he frantically paced his library, the issue growing clearer. He could kill the child or put him away, and that must have been his first thought, or with the assistance of Rome he could annul the marriage and marry again. But that meant a declaration of his own infamous situation, and his pride rebelled.

He compromised in the end, as better men had done before him. His throne was not too secure at the best; already were symptoms of the revolt which later overwhelmed him. The possession of an heir gave him strategic advantage.

And he may have believed her not sane. Her very confession, so suicidal, so inexplicable from any point of view but her own, must have seemed almost irrational. Indeed, Clotilde says she believes he would have discredited the story entirely, laid it to one of those temporary manias which occasionally follow childbirth, had not the chief court physician, after dutifully insisting that the child was premature, gone off and blown out his brains.

But whatever he may have believed or known, he did the one thing the girl queen had never anticipated, sent her away and kept her child. But always he hated him.

Clotilde has a confidential letter, written to her by an English governess when Toto, as he was familiarly called, was six.

“He is very bright and active,” she wrote. “But so lonely. Once a day he sees the King, but only for a few minutes. And I think his Majesty is rather severe; the discipline is military, and he has more to learn than is good for so young a child. However—”