Chapter XIII: Part II: I (8)

“If it were not the Princess, one would almost say she looked reckless,” murmured Piroska to Fessenden, who was staring at the vision--the only one of the company, perhaps, who found nothing foreign in Ranata’s appearance. Piroska compelled him to transfer his gaze. “That is the way I have always imagined a girl might look who had made up her mind to elope,” she continued.

Fessenden started slightly, and quick as he was with his words, the Countess noticed it. “The Princess has the cruelty of your sex,” he replied. “She doubtless occupies a very considerable part of her time thinking out new gowns with which to distract us.”

“Why don’t you look more hopeless?” whispered Piroska.

“Must you have men who wear their hearts upon their sleeves?”

“No; but no man can wear a mask forever, unless he is secretly happier than he would have us believe.”

“I am always happy; it is a mere matter of temperament.” He paused deliberately and looked at her. “Moreover,” he added, “I have no intention of failing.” And then he joined the group about the Archduchess. They had parted but two hours before, and although he had never been so convinced of her love for him, there had been nothing then of the almost reckless promise which her eyes seemed to flash to his as the movement was made towards the lower end of the room. What did it mean? Had an hour of solitary thought in the dark, before her maids came to dress her, beaten her passion so high that it had overwhelmed her traditions at last, and urged her to take advantage of this opportunity for flight? He turned giddy at the thought and suddenly realized that deeply enamoured as he was with the idea of manipulating princes, his want of the woman extinguished this ambition among others, and that he found incomplete happiness something more than torment.

The hall was of immense proportions, and the dining-room being far off, beyond many chill corridors, the table was spread at the end farthest from the doors that opened directly upon a platform in front of the castle. The cannon were still in the embrasures. In the light of the many, yet insufficient, lamps the room with its battle-flags and weapons, its skins and dim hangings embroidered with the old arts of Hungary, so recently revived, was feudal enough to please the most exacting American.

“Count,” murmured Alexandra, “if you could only provide an earthquake shock among other phenomena I believe I should no longer resist.”

“You need an earthquake,” he replied. “But, of course, I am gratified, and hopeful, at the conquest of the castle.”

“I shouldn’t care to live here all the year round, however.”

“Heaven forbid! even with the most adored of women. Give me the capitals of the world in winter.”

“It is a great comfort to feel that our tastes are so much alike!” And she thought, “The Hungarians may be two-thirds fire and impulse, but no American could take his cues more quickly.”

Zrinyi, who was not in a sentimental mood, continued: “I have a surprise for this night, if not an earthquake. I find that the peasantry all through these mountains have been much excited since they heard the Princess was coming here--that is to say, the sister of Rudolf. Most of the young men were beaters at one time or another for him, and those who were not, and the old and the women, invariably managed to see him when he came to Görgény. His delightful manners, combined with the halo of monarchy, made them worship him in a manner which few modern princes have known--Ludvig II. perhaps furnishes the only parallel. Nor will they believe him dead. They know that our princess resembles him in many respects, and doubtless they have some sort of hope that she can give them definite news of him, that perhaps she has come to announce his return from the dim unknown. So I have sent men about inviting them to come here to-night. She has another opportunity to draw to herself the love that has been wasted since Rudolf’s death. I am grateful that she is looking her best to-night, for although she is always beautiful, she has appeared less brilliant of late.”

“She wears color to-night,” said Alexandra dryly; “that is the whole secret.”

“I am not a fool, mademoiselle; I understand quite well, and sincerely wish she could be happy. But unhappiness is the fate of princes. They are born in sacrifice, and they die in it, having known little else. But our princess has so much to give--it is a great pity I don’t waste my sympathies on them as a rule. And your brother--it is his first disappointment? It will go hard with him, but any man worth the name can get over anything.”

“That is comforting! If Ranata and Fessenden suddenly made up their minds to run off, should you help them?”

“Run off? Great Heaven! How could you conceive such a thing even in jest? The Hapsburgs have done a good deal for love--but that!”

“An American? That is the point? It would be a good beginning.”

“I have always wondered,” murmured Zrinyi, “why you did not put three heads on your eagle while you were about it.”

“The two-headed one was sufficiently absurd to deter us. You have not answered my question. Should you help them?”

“I suppose I should. My sympathies would be with them as lovers, being in such a deplorable condition myself. But I should not approve, for I believe in the principle of monarchy, and that would deal it a heavy blow. But a liaison--there is no objection to that if it were circumspectly managed. That shocks your American prudery; but in the case of princes it is a desirable outlet for the feelings they have in common with the rest of human-kind, especially when a still more vital principle is at stake. Our princess can preserve this monarchy if any one can, and I for one would welcome her as the solution; for William, with all his great qualities, is perhaps a trifle too high and mighty for Hungary, and his second son is still an unknown quantity. It would be criminal in her to desert us, but a liaison would do no one any harm.”

“I don’t take monarchies as seriously as you do, and I have brought up Ranata too well--she will have no liaisons. Besides, my brother plays for high stakes. It is the best or nothing with him.”

“Men have been known to take what they could get; and there are elements in our princess which are beyond even your training. To-night she looks like a beautiful ripe fruit hanging heavily from the tree. The Hapsburgs have bad blood in them; not a drachm of the Puritanism of the Hohenzollerns. The Princess has it in her to be a great sovereign, but--_bien_; the world is her oyster; why should she not open it?”

“If I marry you it will be to reform your morals. Not that they are worse than those of any other European.”

“American morals are _bourgeoise_.”

“So is its hypocrisy! But we like things that way. I may even make an American of you yet.”

“I have no objection to being an American if I can live in Europe. And all the Americans I have met seem to make no difficulty about that. I suppose your excellent father would not wish me to go into business with him?”

“I am sure he would not!”

“Sarolta,” murmured Prince Illehazy, “I have been uneasy for some time. Has not the moment come to speak?”

“I have spoken--this afternoon--and her philosophical calm staggered me.”

“I see no evidence of philosophical calm.”

“It is a transformation I do not understand--although I understand it as a manifestation better than the philosophy. I shall ask Mr. Abbott to go as soon as we reach Budapest, and doubtless he would be obliged to return to America very soon in any case; although I had a letter yesterday from his step-mother, and she seemed to take his long absence without protest. I do not care to do anything further without something more specific as an excuse than the young man’s devotion, and an expression of reckless defiance worn for one evening. Besides, we have Piroska to do the spying. The King will not remain too long unwarned. But Ranata’s love-affair hardly worries me as much as this perhaps too sudden popularity. I fear it may be overdone, and will alarm Franz, possibly the King. Ranata has not a thought of usurpation. I am convinced of that. But--”

“Exactly. I saw Königsegg when I was in Vienna last week, and he tried in his delicate way to pump me. He learned nothing, but I did. The wind is blowing the wrong way. If the Princess, in a moment of haughty forgetfulness, drops her policy of conciliation towards Königsegg, or he becomes suddenly fearful of American influence--for Mr. Abbott may go, but he will return, or I know nothing of men--or the minister fears to anger the heir--then our beautiful princess will go back to her cage in the Hofburg.”

“In that case I should not care to be the Emperor,” remarked the Princess Sarolta.

Ranata suddenly lifted her hand. “I hear such a peculiar noise,” she said. “Is a storm rising?”

The rest became aware of a deep low murmur, not unlike the rolling in of tides. Zrinyi left the table hastily and looked from one of the narrow windows at the upper end of the hall.

“I will send for your cloaks,” he said, “and then I shall ask you to step out on the platform for a moment.”

A few minutes later he threw open the great doors of the hall, and the party stared silently at the scene before them. The full moon swung close to the ice-fields, the white harsh peaks high above. In the court-yard, on the small plain beyond, on every snowy hill and rock, were crowded hundreds of men clad in the skins of the sheep, the wolf, the goat, and the bear. On their heads were high fur hats, which exposed but a fringe of long hair on their shoulders and concealed their brows, giving them an aspect of singular wildness. But they were very quiet, almost breathless, until Zrinyi stepped forward and shouted something in Roumanian. Then each man lifted a flute to his lips, and a sweet and savage melody stole forth gently, to rise and swell until all the vast and desolate scene seemed to bend and listen. The notes might have been born of the peaks that looked as if torn asunder by harsh unlovely hands, then softened to beauty and gentleness by the silver glitter of the snow. And the strains, piercing yet remote, had in them too the eternal loneliness of the mountains, the only thing in Nature akin to the eternal loneliness of the great. The hills took up the echo and rolled it on, and among far and hidden peaks a laugh seemed flying from itself.

When they had finished, Zrinyi turned to Ranata. “They have come here to see your Royal Highness,” he said; “and not so much because you are our princess as the sister of our lost crown prince. Have I your permission to ask them to enter?”

Ranata, who was pale, turned paler. “Yes,” she said. “Ask them in.”

The guests returned to the lower end of the hall, whence the table had been removed, and threw off their cloaks. The women made a brilliant group in their elaborate dinner dress, their flowers and jewels and superfluous fans.

The Wallachians and Roumanians--there are few of Hungarian blood so far south in Transylvania--came silently but eagerly in. Each man as he entered removed the tower of fur on his head, revealing a dark mane of matted hair. The countenances thus exposed were mild and often handsome, but the dark eyes burned and flashed with an excitement of which they gave no other evidence.

Ranata remained with the group until the incoming throng had almost filled the hall. The doors were still open, and behind the mass of heads on the platform she could see the snowy slopes of the range, whose silences seemed to have fallen upon the castle; no one spoke, and the sandals of the mountaineers pressed the floor silently. Zrinyi murmured a suggestion, and Ranata ascended a few steps of the staircase which finished the hall. All the voluptuous beauty had left her face; it was so white that her eyes burned black. Her aspect would have been angry had it been less stern. She could not speak Roumanian, but Zrinyi had hastily taught her a few words.

“I am the sister of your crown prince,” she said. “And I am honored and happy that you have come to see me.”

They gazed at her for a few moments in a heavier silence. To them she had lost nothing of a beauty they had never seen, and in the wavering lights, possibly because at the moment her mind was face to face with her brother, her likeness to Rudolf was so strong as to send the blood to their heads. It rose slowly, for they were cold with long waiting and taken by surprise with a beauty they had not expected, but when they realized that the sister of their prince and the chiefest object of his affections stood before them, they suddenly sent forth a mighty cry, hard, wild, abrupt. It was almost a note of agony, such as the mountains might have given when the fires of the earth boiled them apart. The cry shot out again, but this time it swelled into volume, ended in a roar, and then split into intelligible sound. “_Élyen!_” “_Setreasca!_” “_Setreasca!_” shook the old flags like the wind of battle; then, on a higher note, “Rudolf!” “Rudolf!” “Rudolf!” They came forward like a great wave, excited, voluble, demanding to be told what they had done to anger their prince that he came no more, what his wicked enemies had done with him, why his father, the great King and Emperor, was hiding him. It was idle to attempt to answer, and Ranata stood looking down upon them, at times forgetting the strange scene, her thoughts in the crypt of the Capuchin Church with her brother. Suddenly she heard herself addressed in Hungarian, and glanced aside to see a gypsy standing on the step below her. He was regarding her with admiring eyes, but there was a sardonic twinkle in them, and his mien although friendly would not have inspired confidence in an idiot. However, Ranata came forth from her thoughts and smiled on him.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

He addressed her in the most extravagant forms of homage, but when he answered her question it was with directness enough.

“I was with his party on every visit,” he asserted triumphantly, as if exhibiting a valued stock-in-trade; “I and my band. He was always eager to hear the Chardash. And out on Lake Zenoga, sometimes at Görgény, we sat at his board, or in the circle by the fire. Oh, those were the days, your Highness--first a prince, then a gypsy, then a prince, then a gypsy, all mixed up, all drunk, everybody happy. I know that Rudolf is dead, for I have travelled far, but I wish he were not.”

The man’s speech broke through the severity of her mood and she laughed. “I have no doubt they were gay times,” she said, “and I regret that I am not a man to come and take his place among you. But I will do the best I can; and believe that I shall love you as much as he did.”

The man shook his head. “We would never dare to love like that again.” He paused, then added meaningly, “The love of the chosen Hapsburgs is fatal--to themselves and to those who win it.”

Ranata looked over the man’s head as if he had disappeared into the still shouting multitude; but he had the assurance of his race, which acknowledges neither country nor king, and he repeated:

“It is always fatal, your Royal Highness.”

Then Ranata looked down at him once more. After all, the creature was not worth crushing, and he was diverting. Moreover, he had known and doubtless been spoiled by her brother. Rudolf had told her many anecdotes of the gypsies who always attached themselves to his Transylvanian household.

“You will not return to us!” continued the gypsy. “When Rudolf left us the last time I said he would not return. Nor did I predict it because he said to us not ‘_Aufwiedersehen_,’ but ‘_Good-bye_.’”

“Is that true?”

“It is true, but that was not the reason. When he came that last time I said he would not return.”

“And how do you know I shall not return?”

“Because love is fatal to the chosen Hapsburgs, your Royal Highness.”

“Then they can avoid love,” said the Archduchess impersonally.

“Not when they are made for it. Nature has protected many by a mask as ugly as the plague. When she gives them beauty be sure it is to scourge the proudest house on earth, and to chastise it for centuries of cruelty and oppression.”

“Maria Theresia was beautiful.”

“She was fat. She also had more children than a man ever can remember. Besides, she was not really beautiful.”

“And you are not very logical. Other houses of Europe have records for injustice as great as ours may possibly have.”

“Nature has taken other methods to punish them. Be sure that none shall escape.”

“I suppose you wish to tell my fortune. I have not superstition enough for that, but in the name of my brother I will send you a purse to the servants’ quarters to-night.”

She withdrew into the polite silence with which royalty lays down the burden of audience, but the gypsy held his ground. He thanked her extravagantly, and added: “I am more honest than most gypsies, your Royal Highness--I do not pretend to see too far into the future. But when a man’s heart is black with remorse and bitterness and hatred of life and the reckless indulgence of passions, I can see the end; and when a woman--”

“Go!” said Ranata; and this time the man mingled his featureless sheepskin with the others. She beckoned to Zrinyi and spoke with him a moment. Then he stood beside her and lifted his hand. Every man seemed to shut his voice between his teeth.

“Her Royal Highness wishes me to tell you,” said the Count, on a note which carried to those beyond the door, “that Rudolf is dead. That he has gone where you may meet him again if you are faithful and loyal subjects to the throne. She will tell you herself.”

And Ranata said in Roumanian, and with the cold accent of finality, “He is dead.”

Zrinyi let the words sink into the silence, then he raised his voice again and shouted that barrels of wine were opening in the kitchen, and the great wave turned upon itself and rolled out, but still in silence and with many a backward glance.

Ranata ascended the stairs. When she returned she wore a short skirt and a long fur cloak with a hood.

“I am going for a walk,” she said to the astonished company. “Mr. Abbott, will you come with me?” Then to the Princess Sarolta, who had risen, she added, “No power can prevent me. But do not be alarmed; I shall return.”

“Do you give me your royal word for that?” asked the alarmed Obersthofmeisterin, “otherwise, old and lame as I am, I shall follow you.”

“I give you my word. You may sleep in peace.”

XXVI

Fessenden and Ranata walked rapidly and in silence over the paths the mountain peasants had trodden that night. There had been neither wind nor snow for many days, and what had fallen was compact and not too smooth for impatient feet. For a time the path was straight, and, looking back, the irregular mass of the castle on its isolated rock was the one dark object in the white radiance of the Alpine world. Soon, however, a sharp turn about the foot of one of the peaks that rose straight from the brief level seemed to fling them abruptly into an eternity of ice-fields and endless chains of glittering crests so high above that their fierce teeth must surely bite new pictures into the moon that hung so close. Ranata’s arm was within his, but Fessenden’s mind reverted to his boyhood in the Adirondacks, when he had stolen forth to his balcony on winter moonlight nights to gaze upon the snowy lake and peaks, and dream of their kin in the far-off Alps. How tame that picture seemed to-night, dear as it was! That was a mild and pleasant wilderness compared with this upper firmament of ice and desolation, with its black forests below and on high its masses of rock and crag that looked as if arrested in brutal warfare with each other.

In the course of an hour the path came abruptly to an end on the shore of a small lake, from three sides of which the mountains rose like the straight and jealous sides of a mighty jewel casket guarding the diamond treasure of some old god of the hills. The lake, looking smaller perhaps from the great height of the perpendicular mountains surrounding it, was oval in shape, and its frozen surface glittered and sparkled under the moon poised directly above. No light of man had ever drawn such radiance from the diamond. The air was so still that the cold was hardly noticeable. The silence was intense, oppressive, now that their feet no longer met the snow crisply. Ranata put her hand nervously to her head.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of my boyhood in the Adirondacks. To-night a thousand years seem to have disappeared since then. And many and wild as were my dreams of the future in those callow days when I had leisure for dreams, no flight penetrated to the future which held these last weeks, to the indescribable solitude of this night with you. In those days I fancied myself a poor boy who had begun life in the orthodox log-cabin and must end in the White House. But that I should love a daughter of the Cæsars and hold her in my arms among the eternal snows of the loneliest of the Alps never muttered in my most exalted moments. Life is a rum thing.”

Ranata laughed in spite of the chaotic emotions that had driven her forth. “Which do you really love best, I wonder, the sublime or the ridiculous? Do you know what I had almost made up my mind to do when I came down to dinner?”

“To go to-morrow with me to Fiume?”

“To-night; as soon as the others were out of the way, and Zrinyi could have the horses harnessed. After I left you there was an hour in which I think I really was mad. Every fact of existence except the possibility of being alone with you on your yacht seemed to have been burned out of my mind. I would have sold Austria to William, I would have flung Hungary to Roumania--there was no crime I would not have committed to have been alone on this earth with you. And now we are alone, and the fever is gone. I look back upon the hours before those poor creatures came and shouted Rudolf’s name as upon some half-remembered interval of insanity. But it was appallingly real then, and if it came once it may come again. After our return to Budapest--and I shall start to-morrow--I shall never see you again.”

“I still think you are unwise not to take advantage of this opportunity. You will regret it; take my word for that.”

“Doubtless, when it is happily too late. I am ice now. I can only describe my sensation while those wild men were begging me for Rudolf by asking you to imagine yourself standing under that frozen cascade over there. It seemed to me that for the first time I realized the enormity of his crime. He could have been a great monarch, he could have preserved his country, he could have saved Europe from unimaginable horrors; and every gift, every duty, every ambition disappeared into the flaming abyss of his passions. Oh, if my father could only have died twenty years ago! That alone could have saved Rudolf, for it was excess that killed him; the occasional indulgence would not have mattered. And these men, and thousands like them, would have obeyed his lightest call to save Austria from Europe, to save it from Hungary if need be. They would come at my call. They would laugh even at my father. And, Fessenden, above those wild heads, and bodies like mountain beasts, I saw for a moment the pale face of Rudolf, terrible with agony and remorse, with impotent resentment against the law of the grave, dumbly beseeching me to continue the work that the great invisible forces up there had sent him into the world to accomplish. It was then that my blood turned to ice. An hour before--and in other moments, perhaps--I had been capable of greater guilt than Rudolf’s; for after all I have had no such temptations, no such provocations as his. Where you have upheld me, women, from the time he was old enough, the very girls of the court, flung themselves beneath his feet, honored to be dishonored by the heir to the throne, even had he been less fascinating as a man. My father had made no secret of his own amours; there has been no more corrupt court in Europe; Rudolf saw no necessity for restraint, and he used none. If he had married happily all might have been well, for he was not vicious, and his nature was very affectionate. But when does royalty marry happily? Fortunate the prince who marries the cow. Then at least there is one incentive the less. Rudolf had no such fortune, and disappointment and _ennui_, multiplying themselves, drove him to the arms of charming women who wished for nothing so much as to make him forget, and from them to the boon companions who adored him, but dared not remonstrate had they wished, when he drank till morning. But what excuse had I? Only that of a passion so great and so real that it should give me the strength of these mountains. Without it, after gaining my wishes in Hungary, I might have become bored, indifferent, cynical; I might even, as I felt youth passing, have indulged in amours that no one would dare to take me to account for. I might have gone to my coffin there in the Kaisergruft without an ideal in my soul, disillusioned, all my original nature in ruins, reviling life, glad to die. Now it seems to me that after the inevitable agony is over, I have it in me to become really great in character, sustained by an inner life and fed by a memory that will keep me young till my death. I thought of this long ago, when I met you first, but it passed from my mind. It was more like a dream then. I know it to be a reality now. I doubt if there can be any such actual happiness as what I shall find in the memories of you.”

Fessenden looked at her long and intently. If she was of many and variable moods, the moods were of an intensity and truth which submerged the other women in her while they lasted. And he always responded to her deeper moments so fully and so involuntarily that only his ever-alert brain saved him from compromising his future conduct. As in the profoundest solitude he had ever known, he looked through her eyes into her naked soul, he had a long moment of doubt. In that cold ideal of fulfilled duty, with her love apotheosized and spiritualized, might she not in truth be happier than he could make her? Her state, and the more commonplace cause of the deep chill of an Alpine midnight, had cooled his own blood, and muffled the passionate voices in his imagination. For a moment he too felt the white intoxication of the ideal of a lifetime of self-immolation on the passionless shores of duty, forecasted the serenity with which Nature rewards perpetual striving after spiritual heights, and compensates for the voluntary resignation of the joy of love. He darted a glance upward and was visited by a brief illusion: he and Ranata stood alone on the highest peak that pierced the stars. Then like Life he compromised.

“I wish for nothing less than your full and unconditional surrender,” he said. “If, when you have had time to know yourself better than you do now, you tell me that your decision is unalterable, I will persist no further. I believe that you will send for me before long, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps I have been blinded by my love, and the hopes with which it has inspired my imagination. There may be, there are, of course, depths in your mind of which I have no conception. These may contain forces that will finally shut me out of your life. If you convince me that I should add to your unhappiness by persisting, or that I should do you a great wrong by making you mine in spite of yourself, then I promise you here solemnly to withdraw finally from your life; and to be as eternally faithful to you as I believe you will be to me.”

* * * * *

Vilma from her high window saw them return. She had watched for them, not from the motive which had made her neighbor walk restlessly between her window and her writing-table, but in tempestuous sympathy with a romance against which she pressed so close. Her own heart she believed to be a graveyard with one tomb, and she found a vicarious happiness in this atmosphere of passionate and uncommon love that she was graciously permitted to enter. She had seen how it was from the first, and had done what she could to divert the attentions and the suspicion of Piroska. Pumping had had no effect on the wary Zápolya, and Vilma, with all her subtlety, was still in doubt as to what the possible enemy may have seen or suspected. She had followed Fessenden and Ranata on the night of the ball, and waited without the door leading to the private apartments until she heard him returning; that she might be able to assure Piroska she had been their companion and chaperon. But Piroska had given no sign that she had been occupied during that brilliant night except with her many partners, and Vilma dared not tell Ranata what she had done. Gracious and captivating as the Princess was in her new rôle, it would have been a braver than Vilma who would have taken a liberty with her. Fessenden possessed no great charm for this young Hungarian, who preferred a more romantic type, but if he had inspired love in her beautiful princess she wished with all her heart that he too were of the blood of kings. Had these two been content with intrigue she would willingly have helped and shielded them, but she shrewdly suspected the truth. Astounding as the fact might be, the American wished to marry the daughter of an emperor and king. It took the ancient pattern of her brain a long while to adjust itself to the bare idea, but when time had accustomed her to its audacity she could, starved soul that she was, but sympathize. She too had had an intuition of Ranata’s state of mind when she bloomed upon them at dinner that night, breathing passion and defiance, and she heartily wished the Princess had slipped out of the castle with her lover instead of giving her word to the Obersthofmeisterin to return.

She had also overheard the words of Piroska to the American, and she had noted that the moment the Princess left the castle the sister lady-in-waiting had pleaded the morning toothache and gone to her room. It adjoined Vilma’s, and for two hours the friend had listened to the steady scratching of the enemy’s pen, interrupted only by hasty visits to the window. Vilma had lived close enough to Piroska during these months of court life to be sure she did not keep a diary. She was now fully convinced that she was the tool of Königsegg for two reasons: it was worth her while, and she had intended to marry the American when he became convinced of the hopelessness of his suit. Piroska’s wiles had been patent enough if her hostility had not, and to-night, as the American had turned to her with an air of conclusion and six words which might have extinguished hope in a more sanguine heart, the hard little face of Piroska had settled into lines of malice and determination. She had been as gay as usual during the dinner, but the color had come back neither to cheek nor lips, and Vilma suspected that if the unfortunate lovers had flown that night Piroska would have managed to follow them as far as the first telegraph station. Now, no doubt, she was writing her long-deferred report.

As Vilma watched Ranata and Fessenden return, she slipped from the window-seat and climbed onto the bed, still huddled in her furs. The fire was out and the room almost cold, but she could not prepare for sleep knowing of the plot thickening in the next room. The hour had come to act, but what should she do? To attempt to intercept Piroska’s letter on the morrow would be futile; Piroska would see to that. Vilma did her justice; there would be no loose ends, as in novels, for the good fairy to unravel. Should she walk boldly in and hurl suspicion in her face? Vilma was too European to approve of the crude method. The wild idea occurred to her of smothering Piroska with a pillow as she slept, but she had a certain measure of common-sense; a tragedy in the royal household would put an end to court life in Buda for the present, perhaps thwart ambitions she half suspected, possibly send herself to keep company with Piroska. She dismissed with some reluctance the idea she was quite capable of executing, and suddenly determined to go into Piroska’s room and be guided by events. She left the bed and knocked on the connecting door; then, assuming that she had been answered, opened it and entered.

“I cannot sleep,” she said, “and I heard you moving about, so I thought you might be as glad of company as I. You are writing? How can you in this cold? Do you know I sat up to watch them come home? Not that I doubted they would, but I felt as if I were living in a chapter of romantic memoirs. I may write mine some day--but you should do that--you are so much cleverer than I.”

Piroska had risen politely and pushed a chair slightly away from her table. She had a small pile of manuscript before her, which she had the presence of mind not to attempt to conceal. “I _am_ cold,” she said, stifling a yawn, “and tired. But I could not go to bed. The excitement of the evening made me hopelessly wide awake, so I thought I would write my long-neglected letters.”

“It has been exciting--those wild simple creatures! But that looks like a book. Tell me--” her eyes were bright with girlish curiosity, “_are_ you writing a novel? You could! Ah! I know you are!”

“Well,” said Piroska, with a delicate hesitation, “I--for Heaven’s sake don’t breathe it, Vilma! One is such a fool until one succeeds!”

Vilma gave an ecstatic cry, and with a movement as swift and unexpected as that of a panther flung herself upon the mass of papers. “Let me see! Let me see!” she cried. But they were torn from her hands and the eyes that met hers blazed with the ferocity of a less civilized century.

“You dare!” gasped Piroska--“you dare!”

Vilma had seen enough. “Oh, very well,” she said haughtily. “I had no idea a book was like a tiger’s cub. It made me quite wild with curiosity, and I am sorry we tore the manuscript. Good-night. I would not sit up and copy it if I were you. Your tooth will be quite frightful to-morrow.”

She swept out, and locked the door as she closed it. Piroska, too, might be capable of using a pillow. She took down a candlestick and let herself noiselessly into the hall. It was very dark, except for the patches of ghostly moonlight; but commonplace fears were unknown to this girl of fighting ancestors, of women who had suffered worse than death. She knew that the men’s rooms were in the opposite wing, and she traversed the long corridors between without adventure or qualm. When she reached the wing she saw light under two doors; Zrinyi had undoubtedly sat up to await the return of the Princess. Which was the American’s door she had no means of knowing, but she did not hesitate. If her knock summoned Zrinyi she would tell him that she had a message for his guest which must be delivered then. It brought Fessenden, however, and she stepped quickly into his room and closed the door.

He did not look as astonished as she had expected, but she told her story breathlessly and begged him to act at once.

“It will do no good to intercept the report,” she added. “Even if you could, she would merely write another. But let me go to the Princess and beg her to fly with you to-morrow early. We could shut Piroska up for twenty-four hours. If you do not take this opportunity you will never have another. Her Royal Highness must have many enemies at court. This will be the final straw. If she is forced to return to Vienna you will never see her again.”

“I wish that report to go to Vienna to-morrow,” said Fessenden, “and if you are not too tired to sit down for a few moments, I will tell you how you can help when she is once more in the Hofburg.”

XXVII

Two nights after her return Ranata went to the opera-house of Budapest for the last time. Much to her chagrin she was ten minutes late. Royalty has its privileges and virtues. It may exercise the courtesy of promptness without loss of prestige, and no men and women the world over sit in an opera-box with the same ease and dignity and grace. From childhood they are trained to stand and sit without moving or betraying fatigue, and if the frequent necessity adds to the sum of their mortal expiations, it makes them as decorative, when properly dressed, as their ancient palaces and historical pageants.

But for one princess the tenor of the day had been disturbed. A sleepless night had resulted in an involuntary nap at three o’clock in the afternoon. Her drive had been late, and she had returned home so short a time before the early dinner that her maids had detained her through half of it. She regretted having announced her intention to attend the opera, but it was a _première_, and she would have been expected in any case.

The large house was crowded with the gay aristocracy of Budapest, and with many who, if not so highly placed, could dress as well, and contribute to the general effect of brilliant beauty: an effect which owed more than the women would have admitted to the varied and magnificent uniforms of the officers. Orders glittered on black coats as on colored, and every woman wore her abundant store of jewels. But fans and heads were moving restlessly. Where was their princess? It was the _première_ in Hungary of Massenet’s “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” and this music-loving people were eager for the curtain to rise.

At ten minutes past seven that mysterious electric current that announces the coming of royalty to the sensitive faculties of Europeans flew over the house; bringing it to its feet, and lifting its eyes to the gala box facing the stage, as if manipulated by a spring.

Ranata, accompanied by Sarolta and Alexandra, her Grand Chamberlain, Prince Illehazy, and Count Zrinyi, entered and advanced to the front of the box, acknowledging the waving of handkerchiefs and clapping of hands, the well-bred “_Élyens_” and “_Vivats_” and “_Hochs_.” She wore white velvet, a small crown of pearls, and many pearls on her neck. For the first time she showed the wear of too much thought and loss of sleep; she was pale rather than white, and her eyes were listless. During the few moments that she stood there, however, while the band played the national anthem, her guests on either side of her, the admiring house saw only the perfect carriage of her form and head, the undimmed brilliancy of her hair, and that most rare combination of beauty and majesty.

The anthem finished, the royal party took their seats, the opera began. Ranata kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the stage, but although she felt and had been severely drilled in music, hers was the imagination which escapes control under the influence of the only art that penetrates to the key-notes of being. The spell of the limpid semi-religious music swirled round her like a soft tide. She saw far beyond the poor juggler apologizing to the Virgin for desecrating her name that he might gratify a heartless rabble and keep his wretched body from starving; and if she forbade her eyes to wander over the house, every nerve told her that Fessenden Abbott was not there.

She had asked him to leave Hungary immediately upon his return to Budapest, and she knew that if he had not done so--he must await important telegrams--he would not come to the palace, nor to any gathering where she was sure to be. And to attend the opera except in her train would have excited the comment both wished to avoid.

Whether he had gone or not she did not know, for she would not ask Alexandra; if indeed her friend knew, for the brother and sister had said good-bye at the station in Budapest. Ranata, who had been gifted with no greater measure of consistency than the rest of her sex, had hoped to see him while driving, while entering the opera-house, to receive from him some swift involuntary token that he was thinking of her as persistently as she was of him.

For she thought of little else, and she was aghast at the power of love to defy the will. The emotional struggle had induced a physical lassitude she had never known before. That morning she had risen with the thought, “Am I going to send for him to-day? Am I? _Am I?_” And the question had risen again and again, acquainting her for the first time with the insolent defiance of the fixed idea to the higher qualities of the brain. She had had experience of the dual entity in the mental household before, but never so complete a sense of division, nor of possession by faculties which seemed to have forced an entrance into her mind rather than have risen from its depths.

She had not sent for him, however, and she hardly knew whether she had refrained through the exercise of a will which appeared to sit in a corner smiling with amusement, from pride, a sense of futility, or merely because the argument in her mind had not finished in time. In any case she felt so far from her imperious self that she was almost as alarmed as she was unhappy. She was filled with a dull abhorrence of the idea of living the rest of her life on the surface of her nature, as she was attempting to live it to-night. For what else was left her? Did she become queen, and none knew better than she that it was but a possibility among a thousand opposing forces, she could occupy her brain with routine as her father did; but in a constitutional monarchy, particularly in one as jealous of its rights as Hungary, she would exercise so little power that, with her merciless clarity of vision, she must soon know herself for what she was, an ornamental figure-head. It would be the pride of the Hungarians to have the most beautiful queen in Europe, delight the abundant enthusiasm and the loyal instinct of their natures to love their elected sovereign; and they would value her the more for a charm which must unite all factions and preserve them from internal conflict. They would vote her immense sums to live as a queen should, to restore to the old palace of Buda its ancient glories and excite the envy of Europe. All these things she might have, and she knew them to be toys.

Did she sympathize with the tide of liberty rising in the world, and nowhere so vigorously as in Hungary? She had put the question from her again and again, and it had returned as often. Surely he had not revolutionized her brain to that extent; she must be less than herself were she unfaithful to the monarchical idea. And yet, when her mind left Fessenden Abbott it seemed to her that some mysterious force drew it to the great sullen heart of mankind, brooding eternally on its birthright of freedom; every instinct of independence, when not crushed by the tyranny of the Turk or the Russian, still blunted and pruned in a thousand petty and humiliating ways. Would the socialists conquer William? And then--when with greater liberty had come their own adaptation to the unalterable facts of life and human nature--would the world be better, a more habitable place for mankind in the general? And was that the destiny of the human race--the happiness of the many, not the exaltation of the few? That it was a great thought, a grand theory, she did not pretend to deny. But did she sympathize with it?

While she assured herself contemptuously that she did not, that the order of the centuries must be best merely because it was, a part of her brain seemed to her to accept the doctrine, and give itself no concern to argue. She turned her back upon it. Why argue, indeed? A month, a few months hence, possibly a year, the influence that now possessed her would be so far removed that her mind would have recovered its balance, alien thoughts must have sunk so deep that she would only unearth them now and again as curiosities. She made up her mind that if Alexandra did not marry Zrinyi she would put an end to the intimacy with herself; and it seemed to her, in her present unhappy condition, that she would be insensible to further sorrow. She should indeed welcome complete loneliness, barren of outward suggestion. There could be no doubt of the triumph, in time, of her strong will, of her absolute fidelity, in thought as in deed, to the lofty station to which she had been born.

She sighed for her lost superstitions, rather for the superstitions of her fathers which might have been here had no alien influence entered her life. How they must sustain the soul of majesty through its trials, through its loneliness, through the long martyrdom of its earthly course. There had been times when she had heard the deep mutter of those ancient ghosts, when for a brief hour they had risen and possessed her brain. Indeed, there had been hours--usually when Alexandra’s uncompromising practicality summered in its native land--when it had seemed to her that in the depths of her soul was a charnel-house of hideous memories, ambiguous of outline, of old corruptions, unknown in her life but transmitted with her blood, of impulses for tyranny and cruelty, and unbridled passions, of lust of blood, and callous indifference to human suffering. Philip the Second and Joan the Mad were but two of her illustrious ancestors who might have sent filtering down the worst traits and impulses which the human heart is capable of supporting. There had been times when she had believed that had she been born a century earlier it would have needed but the circumstances to make her the vilest of women. She could have reigned with her feet in blood and loved as royal harlots have loved since Messalina burned her pitch in history. And, she recalled, as she listened to the soft passionless music of the opera, there had also been moments when she had regretted that no such life could be hers--wondered if indeed it had not been.

But it was years now since the last of these obsessions had risen, five or six, at least. She had acquired great control over herself; moreover, they had rested impotent under healthy influences; and assuredly in the company of Fessenden Abbott she could not have evoked their memory, the ghosts of those old ghosts. Would it not perhaps be better if she could? Would not even the occasional demoralization of her spiritual nature be a lesser sin than this treachery to the divinity in her royal blood? Were she steeped in superstition she might have known her lover better than she had; but the temptation to marry him, the persistent disposition to look at life from his point of view, would never have assailed her for a moment.

Her eyes during this long reverie, interrupted only by an _entr’acte_, were fixed upon the stage. The surface of her brain had taken its impression of the interior of the monastery where the starving mountebank, cursed by the prior for his blasphemy, had been enticed that he might find absolution in the life of a monk and fill his stomach daily. The priests and friars in their rich white cassocks, the brown interior of the monastic room, made a harmonious and insidious picture, and the despair of the miserable youth while the other cenobites boasted of the arts--painting, sculpture, poetry, music--with which they glorified the Virgin, drew tears from many sympathetic eyes.

The juggler and a kindly friar were alone, and the elect was pouring into the astonished ear of the poor ignoramus the story of the birth of Christ in a manger, and explaining that the Lady of Sorrows understood not only Latin, but all languages, and even dialects, and had as merciful an ear for the outcast as for the king. The mountebank, with his primitive credulity, his almost maniacal terror under the curse of the abbot, is a vivid study of superstition in the Middle Ages. As Ranata’s attention was captured for the moment by the intensity of the final moments of the act, she found herself envying the simplicity of a creature as capable, in his primal limitations, of the extremest satisfaction and happiness as of terror and despair. The second _entr’acte_ is very short. A few moments after the curtain rises the impressive double row of friars in their sumptuous cassocks march out of the chapel to their own solemn music, and the mountebank enters alone, throws off his monastic robe, and in his costume of a harlequin offers his juggler’s art to the glorification of the painted Virgin above the altar. It is a scene almost incredible in its childish superstition, but so pathetic that in that rapt audience neither Jew nor Protestant paid his brain the tribute of a smile. Ranata, of all persons, saw no humor in it, for her mind traversed the history of her race, and halted suddenly at the memory of Maria Theresia, who had sent her daughters down alone into the imperial crypt on the eve of their marriage to pray among the coffins of their ancestors. She recalled how she herself had sometimes felt an impulse to go down there in the night and do likewise, that she might satisfy that something in the depths of her soul so akin to those who had dwelt in the benighted past.