The King, after he had got his face washed, turned out to be not
unprepossessing, although he was a little man and not young. At first,
when he stepped out onto the usual red carpet laid at the station he had
looked rather like an undersized chimney-sweep, and he had seemed rather
bored.
“But he brightened up when he saw her,” said Clotilde. “I don’t mean
that he ever loved her—he had somebody else, I believe—but since he
had to marry, he must have felt that he was fortunate.”
Just what he thought of his suite nobody knows. He stood it for three
days anyhow, hunting part of the time, with the Princess taking fences
that endangered the royal neck, all sewed into her habit as she was, and
Rudi undoubtedly setting a pace and praying for a casualty. But the King
was game, although he sat down with great care in the evenings.
And on the evening of the third day he got down to business, in the old
Archduke’s study. Things were not going as well as they should. The
revolutionary party was at his heels, and he needed a good healthy
rallying point for public sentiment.
“Such as—”
“Such as an heir,” said the King.
The Archduke, I believe, stated that both he and the Archduchess came of
fertile stock.
“Yet you have had but the one child,” said the King.
“One may be childless without being sterile, sire,” said the Archduke
dryly, and flicked a glance at his wife’s portrait over the fireplace.
They came to some sort of agreement finally and sent for the girl. And
while they were waiting one of the King’s gentlemen brought in a leather
case and put it on the desk. It lay there, unopened, when the Princess
came in.
The Archduchess herself had overseen her dressing that night. They had
put a net studded with pearls over her fair hair, and she wore the white
dress trimmed with seed pearls. She had begged for a scarf to cover her
arms and shoulders, for there was very little of the bodice, but the
Archduchess had grimly refused. She had become a shop-woman showing the
wares she had for sale.
Maybe something tugged at the Archduke’s heart-strings when he saw her,
for he was rather gentle for once, and he took her by the arm.
“His Majesty has done us—done you—the great honour of asking for your
hand in marriage,” he said.
“I have no wish to marry,” she said, frozen cold.
“Tut, tut!” said the Archduke. “The timidity of a young girl, sire.” And
he closed his hand on her arm until she almost fainted. The King’s eyes
narrowed.
“We will not hurry you,” he said with a little smile. “To-morrow,
perhaps—”
The leather case still lay there unopened when they sent her out of the
room. Later came the ball, and as if things were not bad enough already,
when the ballroom doors were thrown open it was found that the candles
in the great crystal chandeliers had melted from too much heat, and
there were piles of wax stalagmites on the floor.
Sometime between night and the next morning the Princess agreed.
“What else could she do?” Clotilde said. “They gave her her choice of
that or of going into a convent. And she was so young, only seventeen.”
The next day the leather case was opened and the King put over her head
the great black pearl necklace in which Di Bicci later painted his
famous portrait of her, swathed in rose tulle with the pearls a smoky
grey rope that fell almost to her knees.
“She was like a dead creature,” Clotilde said. “But even then she
believed Rudi would find some way out. But even Rudi failed her just
then. Oh, only for a few hours, but it was almost more than she could
bear.”
Rudi was only out trying to get himself killed. He was a good Catholic
and he did not believe in suicide, but he had seen the pearls on her
neck and he clearly perceived that she had, so to speak, sold him out.
When he came back safe—damnably safe—Clotilde went to him with a
message and he told her to go where he had been trying to go all day.
It was, one realises, not an original situation to that point; the usual
arranged marriage of the courts, with a hot-eyed lover somewhere in the
offing and a Princess who cries herself to sleep at night. Most of the
Queens of Europe went from tears to tiaras and seemed to manage very
comfortably thereafter. And after all, as has been said before, “_Après
la sainte cérémonie tout est permis_.”
But from this point the tale varies.
The King hunted and made a little love, mostly apparently to Clotilde,
whom he waylaid in upper corridors and kissed every so often, and Rudi
went to confession to shrive his soul for his thought against the King
and brought away a trifle of information.
“My son,” said the old priest, “between a crown and a convent, what girl
of seventeen would choose the church?”
Rudi apparently digested that and then went home to study the situation.
And I am quite sure, although Clotilde doubts it, that it was Rudi who
planned the night visit to the Gipsy encampment. It does not sound
entirely spontaneous. However that may be, it is certain that on the
third and last evening of the King’s visit the entire party made an
excursion to the camp not far away in an oak wood.
The Gipsies seem to have been a sad lot, living in caves, with the
children naked and all of them screaming and holding out their hands for
money. But the King was not squeamish and insisted on going underground.
The Archduke tore his beard, no doubt, but he had to follow, and he came
out later on holding his nose.
But that is not important. What does matter is that in the darkness Rudi
and the Princess slipped away and were married by the Gipsy chief. A
Gipsy marriage, of course, but to each of them it was a real one. Rudi
never accepted any other version on it.
“It was not a real marriage in the eyes of the church, of course. But
they had taken certain vows in the presence of witnesses, and of course,
to them—”
They had been married “over the tongs” and the only real ceremony
apparently they had conducted themselves; just taking each other for
better or for worse. The Gipsies seem to have constituted witnesses
mainly, and local colour. There was a man with the Princess’s
handkerchief on a pole as a symbol of purity, and another sawing away
violently on a fiddle, and all around were the dark-skinned women who
resembled the lilies of the field only insomuch as they neither toiled,
spun nor washed.
“The Gipsies thought it was a great joke, but—” Her voice trailed off.
It was a moment before she resumed her sewing.
“I don’t know how you feel about it,” she said. “But when two people
love like that and go through a ceremony of marriage before God, it _is_
marriage, I think. And if you had seen their faces you would have felt
as I did, that it was consecrated.”
Before the King left he had formally proposed for the Princess and the
Duke had accepted. He went away, red carpet again, special train and
everything, including his four gentlemen, his gentlemen’s valets and his
own four. The bows were thriftily taken off the pictures, the new
Brussels carpet had a dust cloth laid over it and a new era set in the
old palace.
Instead of coming down now in the evenings to play the piano and be
interrogated, the Princess was carefully instructed in the etiquette of
the court.
“Again and again,” said Clotilde, “her mother would make her enter the
room. She taught her to sit, to rise—no play was ever so rehearsed.”
She went through with it, poor lamb, waiting all the time for Rudi to
perfect his plans for flight; stood while her gowns were fitted to her,
so tight that she could scarcely breathe and so heavy that she wilted
under them. Messengers arrived bringing the King’s gifts to her. A
complete toilet service of gold and ivory was one of them, but she would
never use it.
And then, on the day the date of the wedding was set and the Archduke
sent for her to tell her, Rudi was thrown from his horse and broke his
leg.
Everything was gone in a minute.
She had only just got the word when she was sent for. Clotilde was with
her and she said:
“This is the end.”
She went down the great marble staircase, hung with its Gombaut and
Macée tapestries, now in the French museum at Sainte Lô, and went into
the library. There she stood, very white and trembling, while she was
told.
“The date,” said the Duke, “is such and such.”
“I am sorry, father,” she said, very composed now, “I should have told
you before, but—”
“But what?” said the Duke, suddenly rigid.
“I am already married.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I have told you. I have married Rudi.”
Even to Clotilde I believe the Princess never told exactly what
followed. There seems to have been no noise, for there were people
about, in anterooms and corridors. And for the Archduke’s excuse there
is the fact that he had been about to ally himself with one of the
strong kingdoms and that he needed such alliance.
But the fact remains that the Princess was carried to her room sometime
later with a dislocated wrist, and that it still has the faintest
possible distortion. When she was allowed to get about again, under
rigid supervision, Rudi had been carried off somewhere, and later on he
was sent to Africa to join a regiment there.
There never really had been a hope for them.