Chapter IX

So far they had been able to hide themselves completely. Rudi read the papers in a small coffee-house on the _Kochgasse_ and had found a position doing clerical work in a factory making glassware.

But the longing for his old kind was strong. One evening he sought a larger coffee-house, frequented by the smart Austrian officers, on the Kaerntnerstrasse, and put down his newspaper to see sitting at his table watching him the little envoy with the pigs’ eyes.

“So!” said the little man. “We meet again, sir.”

“I have not had the pleasure, I think,” Rudi said stiffly.

“Let me refresh your memory, then,” said the little man, watching him intently. And was quite explicit.

“Who then,” he went on, “would have foreseen the great tragedy to follow! So young and lively a girl, and apparently so—sane.”

“Yes,” said Rudi, with stiff lips.

The little man leaned over and lowered his voice, still watching warily.

“There are rumours of an escape,” he said. “From Italy. But doubtless you, as one of her oldest friends, have already heard it.”

“I am but recently returned from Africa,” Rudi observed, and calling the _Kellner_ paid his bill.

“Very soon, however,” said Clotilde, “he realised that he was followed. He did not dare to go home. But he had not fought in Africa for nothing, and finally he threw them off.”

They fled to England, and from that time on life was a series of alarms and escapes. In London, for instance, the Queen met the Ambassadress of the velvet tunic over plaid face to face on the street. The enormous drapery at the back had given way to the pinched-in waist and padded hips of that period, and the mass of wadding, topped with a tiny bonnet, stood like a quivering wall before her.

“You need not deny your identity, madame,” said the Ambassadress. “I have had too much misery through you to forget your face.”

“I deny nothing,” said the Queen haughtily, “except your right to detain me on the street.”

She went on, leaving the creature staring after her, but quite sick herself with terror and shock. And as soon as possible they slipped out of England to the Continent again . . .

The old Archduke died. He sat in his bed propped up with pillows and saw the Archduchess come in the door to fetch him.

“I’m quite ready, my dear,” he said. “Why should a man live on when his bowels have turned to jelly?” He chuckled, and held out a skinny hand. “I’ve missed you, my dear,” he said. “But don’t look so damned beatific. It isn’t natural.”

Then he died and all his money went to distant relatives. The Queen, of course, could not touch it. They were very poor.

But aside from all this was their own inner problem; each trying to fight down the love for the other. There was a day when Rudi, desperate, came and stood before the Queen and said he was going away.

“I can’t go on,” he said doggedly. “I have loved no other woman in my life and there will be no other. But either you are my wife or you are not.”

“What was marriage to us was not marriage to the church,” she said, very pale.

“If you believe that, you believe that our boy is—”

“Oh, no!” she cried, and could only avoid that issue by pleading with him to stay.

Rudi, poor devil, stayed on, and at the end of three years one bit of comfort came to at least two of them. It was announced that the Queen had died at her villa in Italy and the court entered into a period of mourning.

Clotilde entered her room one morning in Brussels to find her staring at the announcement of her own death.

“I am twenty-four, Clotilde,” she said, “and I am dead.” Then she broke into terrible weeping. “My baby thinks I am dead,” she said. “My baby thinks I am dead . . .”

She had not seen the boy since the day the King had brought him in from the balcony, and for six years she had fed on the husks she could gather from the press. All that time a craving just to see him had been growing in her.

“She asked very little,” Clotilde said softly. “She could never hold him or even touch him, and she knew that. But just to see him—I cannot tell you how she yearned to see him.”

And finally Rudi agreed that they should make the attempt.

They chose the day of the boy’s seventh birthday, when he was to ride through the capital in an open carriage with the King. They left Brussels one rainy morning by train, the Queen heavily veiled and Rudi with a soft hat to pull down over his face. For once Clotilde was not with them. They were making their pitiful pilgrimage alone.

“Perhaps you did not know Europe before the war,” said Clotilde. “But such events were gala occasions. The buildings were decorated and the streets were always crowded. There was great public rejoicing.”

They found, it seems, a good position near a lamp-post and waited.

Finally there came into sight the King’s own regiment of hussars, and following that the lancers of the Crown Prince. Then the palace guards, and after that the carriage containing the King and Crown Prince.

The boy was standing in the carriage, bowing and smiling, looking about with Rudi’s eyes, smiling Rudi’s smile. And on his left arm he wore a band of mourning!

Rudi put his arm around the Queen to steady her. And the carriage went on.