Chapter VII

The Queen was just past eighteen when they sent her to that dreary villa in Italy, a damp cold place, with its tattered gold and rose papers fairly hanging from the walls, and its sparse furnishing and stone floors.

So far as any one could tell, life was over for her. She was surrounded by obsequious jailers who never let her pass the high wall of the garden, and although she wrote letters, none were ever sent out.

One day she found the little wooden box which now lies on her bedside table, and it became her treasure-house.

“She cut out and kept every scrap she could find in the newspapers about her baby,” said Clotilde. “They are there now, in that box. Some of them are quite worn with much handling.”

She never found any mention of Rudi.

After a time, to save herself from madness, she began to keep a journal, and it was found and published anonymously later by the Countess of B——, who had been in attendance on her. In one place she says:

“What must really matter is to remember rather than to be remembered; to love rather than to be loved. Anything else is selfish. As for the loneliness, are we not always alone? That seems to be the great struggle each human heart makes, to bridge to another heart, no matter how close, the unbridgeable gulf that lies between them.”

And she was nineteen!

But again the journal is more intimate.

“Orange trees and climbing jessamine, and the garden flooded with sunlight to-day. Even I, who am dead, feel the life that is around me outside these walls.”

“I do not weep any more. I must not send waves of wretchedness out into the world, lest they somehow touch and depress _them_. Another press cutting this morning, which has cheered the day.”

And then an unintelligible line or two, to the uninitiated: “She would make him happy, because she loves him. I think I knew that before she did. But have I courage enough to bear it?”

Clotilde has never mentioned that journal.

So one can see them all at that time; the old Archduke sitting alone in his dingy library, fingering his beard and staring at the picture of his dead wife on the wall, faithful to her now that it was too late; the King, fighting revolution and pinning his faith on an heir who daily signalled to him his own infamy; Rudi in a sun-baked African garrison, fighting like a devil when there was fighting on, and drinking himself into forgetfulness in the intervals; Clotilde trying to hold to that peace of God she had found, throwing useless little notes cut into apples over the villa wall; and the Queen searching the papers and journals for some news of her lover and her child, and when she found them hoarding them in the little wooden box.

There is a very definite picture of the Queen at that time. Cut off from the world, she had assumed the attitude and more or less the habit of a nun.

“She wore always the same thing, a trailing habit of soft white wool, high in the neck and with long loose sleeves. And over her hair—you know how lovely it is—she often wore a long white veil, peasant fashion. She seemed to think she ought to hide it. I don’t know why.”

Sometime during her imprisonment came the word that the little Crown Prince was dying. She got that too out of the newspapers, for it is to be remembered always that the King still preserved, possibly even to himself, that fiction of her insanity. Probably she was more nearly insane during that illness of her baby’s than ever before or since.

There is just one entry in her journal in the month that covered it, and it is dateless.

“If he dies, I shall kill myself.”

But sometime during that month occurred that strange incident of which the journal makes no record.

She ran away and went to the capital.

Vigilance had relaxed at the villa, and somehow at night she got out. She took a train at the station, a veiled and slender figure, and was on her way before the alarm was raised.

“She had to pass my house to do it,” Clotilde said. “So many things happen like that in life. Friends are close at hand, and we keep looking past them and far away.”

Once at the capital she drove to the palace. Not to the main entrance, but to that small private one which the King used for his own purposes.

“The sentry was very much frightened when she raised her veil,” Clotilde explained. “But after all she was the Queen. He let her in, crossing himself because the peasants are afraid of the insane, and she went directly up the stairs.”

It was early. Save for a few servants who gathered into whispering groups, nobody saw her, and she went unmolested to the Crown Prince’s suite. Outside the anteroom were doctors and nurses, the cardinal and the Prime Minister. She never looked at them, but passed straight through, and a sort of stricken silence followed her.

The King, you see, was in the anteroom alone. He had been with the child all night, not so much watching a little life ebb away as his own power, his very throne.

He would not let her pass. She prayed and wept, for she was frantic, but he listened unmoved, and as soon as he could get help he had her taken away. The newspapers never printed that story, and the sole result was a redoubled watch on her at the villa after that.

It was on the very day that the Crown Prince was pronounced out of danger that Rudi appeared again.

It was a warm night, and Clotilde had thrown a lace shawl about her and gone into the garden. The air was heavy with magnolia, and—

“I had just been thinking about him, my dear. It was so long since I had heard”—when she saw a man in the roadway, staring up at the Queen’s villa. He was perfectly motionless when she first saw him, but then he made some sort of vague despairing gesture and there was something familiar about it.

“Rudi!” she said, and had to steady herself by the magnolia tree. He came closer and recognised her.

She must have been a lovely young thing that night in her garden, with the lace scarf over her head and the magnolia lighted like stars above her. And Rudi came closer and said in an incredulous voice:

“Clotilde! But surely—”

“It is Clotilde,” she said in a shaken voice.

He took both her hands.

“It seems to me I’ve been looking all over the world for you,” he said.

She must have thrilled to that for a moment, must have had an instant of hope. But it was gone the next second, for he said:

“I might have known you would never desert her.”

But—mark this—he did not know the Queen was sane. Nor that the little Prince was his own child, and Clotilde did not tell him either until the next morning.

“He was so haggard,” is what she said. “He went back to the inn in the village after a time, and I had to think of how to break the news to him.”

It was much more than that, poor Clotilde. Just by keeping silent what might not have happened? Soft Italian skies and early spring gardens, and Rudi lonely and desperate, reaching out to any friendly hand.

“I did not go to bed at all,” was all she said.

By dawn she must have decided, for very early she sent him a note and they had breakfast together. That little touch of intimate life must have pretty well broken down her resolve. One can figure her giving him his morning coffee, and maybe just managing to touch his fingers as she did so, and Rudi perhaps saying:

“Quite like husband and wife, eh what?” or his equivalent of it.

But mostly Rudi staring at the villa above with a hurt and puzzled look.

Later on she told him the young Queen was sane, and a prisoner. He was the old fighting Rudi then, as mad as the man who had staged that mock wedding in the desert town. He knocked over a chair and was for killing the King outright. She could not get in a word.

“But I’ll take his throne away first,” he roared. “I’ll put him in the mud and trample on him. I’ll—”

“I wonder if you will,” she said quietly. Her tone made him turn and look at her.

“Why not?” he said, more quietly.

“Why do you think he has put her away?”

“He never had any right to her. She was my wife.”

“Rudi,” she said, leaning forward, “why has the little Crown Prince the mark of the Archduke’s fingers on his wrist?”

Then he knew.