Chapter VIII

The knowledge of his fatherhood did to Rudi what motherhood had done to the Queen. It matured and sobered him.

“He came a boy and went away a man,” Clotilde put it. “You see, he was trapped like the rest of us. There was of course no hope of ever getting the boy, and to try to overthrow the King was only to risk the child’s life.”

But he began almost fiercely to plot the Queen’s release.

He was no fool, was Rudi. He could stand—and did—at Clotilde’s window for hours, staring at the villa and yearning passionately for the girl imprisoned there. But another part of his brain was acutely active and he began to pin his faith on the Archduke.

“After all, he was her father,” Clotilde explained. “And he had been a violent man, but not so bitter as her mother.”

Rudi, however, found the old man quite gently demented; inclined, she intimated, to horrid reminiscence and quite shocking tales, and always listening for fear the dead Archduchess would hear him. He did not remember Rudi at all.

“He sat there pulling hair out of his head—he had it quite bare in places—and every now and then he would look up at the Archduchess’s picture and then he would whisper.”

That door was closed in Rudi’s face.

So it came finally to a simple question of abducting the Queen. It is rather a long story. Clotilde, too, complicated it by telling what clothing she got ready for her, peasant garments, “but new, of course,” she explained. And it seems Clotilde herself made the underwear, by hand.

Rudi came and settled himself at Clotilde’s cottage, taking her and her moral support very much for granted and seeming to have been as conscious of her as of a comfortable old shoe. He seems not even to have confided his plans to her entirely. He came and went, smoking an old pipe, littering the place generally in masculine fashion and walking his floor long hours at night so that she could not sleep.

But he was hers for that little time. I think she was supremely happy.

“Having him there made a great difference,” was what she said. “I had not cared what I wore for a long time, but I sent to Rome for some clothes and tried to dress cheerfully. He needed brightening.”

And one of the dresses he must have noticed and admired, for Clotilde had kept a piece of it. A white damask with soft pink roses woven through it.

“I had such a pretty hat to go with it,” she said reflectively. “I suppose it would look very queer now. Hats change so.”

Eventually they got her away, and when the search reached their villa there was nobody there but a surprised lady and gentleman, one sewing and the other reading, and a dark-skinned peasant woman in the kitchen cutting up vegetables for soup.

The peasant woman was the Queen.

“The reunion must have been very touching.”

Clotilde sat still and stared out.

“There was no reunion in the sense you mean.” She bent a little lower over her work. “There never—has been, my dear.”

Ah! now, I think, one sees the poignancy of that group in the other room. One realises why the Queen never sets foot in the tidy, barrack-like little room which is Rudi’s, and why Rudi’s face from nose to lip is carved with deep lines of repression. Perhaps even why the Queen still wears her nun-like habit of white wool.

All those years together and only once, after that first night of her rescue, had Rudi even so much as put his arms about her. And then she was not conscious of them.

The priests, you see, had convinced her of sin.

She must have been very pitiful that night of the rescue, with Rudi holding out his hungry arms and she drawing back from them.

“I cannot, Rudi.”

“But you are my wife.”

“I was never your wife.”

“Before God, yes. My wife, and the mother of my child.”

“Which was born in sin, Rudi.”

Perhaps he could have won her even then, but Rudi himself was in a strange state. Those months with the King, so unimportant to her, began to rise between them like a wall once he had got her again. He was insanely jealous of them.

He even at one time laid her attitude to him to love for the King.

“She would go back to him to-morrow,” he told Clotilde.

“Never, Rudi.”

After their first flight, to Vienna—for of course there was the secret hunt for the Queen and a thousand fears and false alarms—when they were settled in a cheap little flat, he added to that jealousy a comparison of what he could give her to what she had from the King. He would not let Clotilde spend a sou on the establishment.

“Why don’t you go back to him?” he demanded brutally one night, when she was sitting like a crushed lily in those dingy surroundings. “He’s tired of the Olga, I hear.” The Olga had been the outside interest for some time. “He could make you comfortable anyhow. I can’t.”

“You would be happier without me, Rudi, wouldn’t you?” she asked wistfully.

“Oh, God, no!” he said, and flung out of the room.

The children who had resorted to the desperate expedient of the Gipsy marriage were gone, you see, and instead here were a man and a woman, passionately loving, held together and yet infinitely separated.

It was that night, later on, that the Queen brought in the wooden box and placed it on the table before him. He lifted the lid and looked inside. Then he put his head down on the table and cried like a child.

Things were better after that.

They could not be husband and wife and they would not be lovers. But when the strain on Rudi became too severe, when his bitterness at what life had done to him made him morose even to the two devoted women, the Queen had her remedy.

She would go and get the wooden box and they would sit for hours over the newspaper cuttings about the little Crown Prince. An oil lamp burning, and Clotilde gone to bed, and those two bent together over the scraps which were all they had of their child.