But what would have been the use? She was the Queen then; she had
already faced the dreadful ritual of a royal wedding night, been
undressed by her strange ladies-in-waiting, and after the King had
joined her been locked in by a high official and the keys taken away.
Rudi stayed for a week, but he never even saw her, and then went on to
his lonely station in Africa. He was twenty-four, and he took back the
streak of snow-white hair the width of two fingers which still gives him
such an odd distinction. The Queen’s father and mother left too, the old
Archduke to exercise the _droit de seignor_ over any pretty peasant girl
who took his fancy and the Archduchess to write those exultant letters
to various royal relatives throughout Europe, copies of which have
recently appeared in various memoirs.
“She made a quite lovely bride,” she wrote in one of them to the Queen
of Sweden. “So composed and still.” Still indeed! Frozen to the very
marrow of her! “She went a little faint after the ceremony, but was soon
her bright and happy self again.”
And in another:
“She is taking her new responsibilities very seriously, as is proper.
Her confessor tells me that she spends some time each day in the chapel,
at prayer. A habit, he suggests, which might be emulated to advantage by
the court.”
It was dawning on her, you see; the trap was closing and she had nobody
to confide in except God. They had sent Clotilde away. She had not
enough quarterings, for one thing, and for another, they had always
suspected her of collusion with Rudi.
This may provide a key for that other cryptic letter, written some time
later by the Archduchess to the English governess, who had more or less
been in the secret, and recently published in her autobiography:
“We have at last got rid of C——. Thank God! She has, I hear, gone to
Africa for the benefit of her health! As R—— W—— is there, one
understands, I think. I can wish neither of them a greater misery than
to marry the other, but it might be a desirable solution, and at least
final.”
Clotilde has never mentioned that letter to me.
It was all over, apparently. The Queen was settled in her apartment at
the palace. Her drawing room was white, a cold room, but not colder or
whiter than the young Queen herself. Her dining room was next, a lofty
circular room of red marble and black columns, and there the King dined
with her occasionally, but less and less often as the weeks went by.
“He liked gaiety, you see,” said Clotilde, “and she could not be gay,
although she tried. She puzzled him, I think. After a while he grew
morose and when the meal was over he used to lean back and watch her.
Not talking, you know. Just watching. Then, if she trembled, it
irritated him.”
And around these two the stealthy life of the court, watching and
whispering; maids of honour, courtiers, ushers, lackeys. All the ancient
panoply, plush and gewgaws and curtsies and hand-kissing; the King with
a private exit by which he slipped out to lead his secret man’s life,
and the Queen under increasing espionage, and by that time carrying her
dreadful secret.
She turned to the church for comfort and at last she confessed to her
private chaplain.
“He was aghast,” said Clotilde. “He seems not to have known what to do.
He prayed all of one night before the altar—an old man, too—and in the
end he told her not to tell the King.”
One can see that old priest, too, I think, stretched on the cold stones
and later going perhaps to his bishop. Heads together, weighing as well
as praying; the very survival of the state perhaps at stake, and two old
men divided between their God and their country.
And the King, disappointed and suspicious of he knew not what. A little
man, vain and arrogant, accustomed to reach out and take what he wanted,
and now finding that the spirit of this simple girl was as elusive as
before he married her. Even jealous of the fact that her slim height
made him seem shorter. Made him, if one can understand, a little less
the King.
“He always walked a step or so ahead of her and it made her feel very
awkward and very alone,” said Clotilde.
On gala evenings, then, the brilliant assembly: women in satins and
brocades—the tiny waists, sharply defined busts and heavy draperies of
the period—hung with jewels, watching and waiting; men in uniforms and
orders; the famous throne-room with its great paintings and its dozen of
glittering crystal chandeliers; and then the Groom of the Chambers
throwing wide the doors and the entrance of the royal party, the King,
small, cold and suspicious, just a little ahead of the Queen!
And somewhere in Africa Rudi staring at the northern stars.
It was after such a night that the Queen fainted again, falling with a
crash against her enormous dressing-table, laden with glittering glass
and gold, and receiving the little triangular scar on her forehead which
she still tries to cover with her soft hair.
And soon after that it was announced to the King by the court physicians
that the Queen would bear him a child.
It is impossible to convey the delicacy with which Clotilde told me that
this expected heir to the throne, so loudly heralded, so politically
vital, was not the King’s child, but Rudi’s. . . .
“If she had only let me know!” Clotilde said. “You see, I went to Africa
that winter and I—saw Rudi. I could have told him and we might have
thought of something. I believe she asked for me, but the King did not
approve of my coming to her.”
Perhaps it is not fair to read between the lines. Perhaps Clotilde did
go to Africa because of “trouble in her chest.” But I think she went out
of a great hunger, to see Rudi again. Why not? After all, the Queen was
lost to him, and he was young. They were all so pitifully young.
But Rudi was changed.
“He was very thin,” she said, “and so bitter! I cannot tell you how
bitter. And he seemed somehow to have turned against me too. I only saw
him once.” She hesitated. “No, I saw him twice, my dear. Why should I
not tell you that? It is all so long ago, and I think he was a little
mad at that time.”
It seems, then, that she saw Rudi at the hotel one morning, where he had
come from his post out in the desert. He seemed to have been brooding,
and he would not hear the Queen’s name at all.
“He had been too much alone, with the natives,” Clotilde explained. “He
wasn’t even very tidy and—he had been drinking, I think.”
But there was no doubt that he had been drinking later on. Toward
evening she received a scrawl from him telling her to come to a certain
little square in the native quarter that night and receive a message for
the Queen. She went, accompanied by her maid, and they found the square
filled with howling, singing and dancing men and women, and in a cleared
space, between two beating drums, Rudi sitting cross-legged on a mat.
His eyes were bloodshot and he had a lamp and a candle burning in front
of him.
Clotilde edged her way near him and said clearly: “You are to come back
with me, Rudi. Back to the hotel. This is no place for you.”
“It’s a good place. A damn fine place,” he said thickly.
“But you have a message for _her_, haven’t you?” she coaxed.
“I had a message, but I forget it,” he muttered. “Ah, yes!” He waved a
hand at the frenzied crowd. “_This_ is the message. Go back and tell her
of my marriage feast. It may lack the resplendence of hers, but it has
its points. It has its points.”
And at that moment a huge black woman decked out in silver bangles and
beads came out of a house, followed by a crowd of yelling women, and
came toward him.
The drums blared and the people shrieked with laughter. Clotilde turned
away sick at heart, and made her way back to the hotel. But before she
got there Rudi had followed her and caught her by the arm. He was not
drunk any longer.
“If you tell her that I’ll kill you,” he said.
“Where’s your woman?”
“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “I never saw her before.”
He made no further explanation. At the hotel he got his horse, and the
last she saw of him he was riding hell for leather down the narrow
street and toward the desert.
V
It is curious to see how the old Archduke played his part in the story
and went on, ignorant that he had contributed to it. But he had left his
mark on the child and that had its consequences.
“You remember that he had hurt her severely in his anger,” said
Clotilde. “Men think their evil deeds die with them, my dear, but they
do not. When the baby came it had the red imprint of his fingers on its
wrist—oh, very distinct. If you were to look now—”
But otherwise this heir to the throne, prematurely born seven months
after the royal marriage, was quite beautiful.
“A true love-child,” Clotilde said gently. “Have you noticed that? One
can always tell the babies born in love, I think.”
And its birth changed two people.
The King, who was one of them, became quite a different person. He
scarcely left the Queen’s bed-chamber for the first three days. He would
come in, send away the nuns and the ladies who happened to be in
attendance, and sit by her great bed for an hour at a time. Not talking.
Just watching her and the child, and sometimes going to the window and
gazing out complacently at the bunting and flags which draped the public
square before the palace in honour of the event.
He seemed at least a foot taller at that time, too.
But it had also changed the Queen. Up to that time she had been rather
like a dazed child, trapped by forces she did not even understand. But
the birth had turned her into a woman.
“It does that, you see,” Clotilde explained. “Have you noticed it, my
dear? Even the expression of the face is often changed.”
The more gentle he was with her the more she felt the wickedness, priest
or no priest, of going on with it. But she prayed fairly steadily to die
so she need not tell him.
“I think,” the King would say, judicially, surveying the infant, “that
he will favour my side of the family,” or words to that effect. And all
the time she could see Rudi in him; Rudi’s bent little finger, Rudi’s
bright hair, Rudi’s square jaw and even the promise of Rudi’s height. He
was a “long” baby.
Apparently it never entered her head not to tell him. Out of this new
maturity of hers had come the conclusion that none of them could go on
living a lie. She would take the child and go away somewhere, anywhere,
so long as she had the boy. Perhaps they could find Rudi, and after the
King had divorced her—
Strange to think how little, after all that time, she knew the King. How
she failed to consider the monstrous vanity of the man. For she waited
three days trying to get strength for the ordeal, and then it was too
late.
It was on the third day that the great public rejoicing took place. The
town and the kingdom was in carnival, and in the afternoon there was a
military procession with the booming of cannon from the fortress. Then
the troops were drawn up in front of the palace, and the King, in
uniform and wearing all his orders, carried the baby out onto a balcony
while the bands played the national hymn.
It was when the King came back in, flushed with triumph, and placed the
child beside her, that she found the courage to tell him.
“He stood by the bed and listened,” Clotilde said. “The crowds outside
were still cheering and the bands playing. She thought he was going to
kill her, and she kept the child close to her for fear he might hurt it.
But he never even spoke. When she had finished he turned and went out
without a word.”
No hand will ever penetrate the veil of the next few hours. The King,
Clotilde has somehow learned, shut himself into his library alone at
first, and one can fancy him there, pacing the floor and stopping now
and then to glance over the place, still filled with carnival figures,
pierrots and pierrettes dancing, grotesque papier-mâché animals on
floats, banners, confetti. Even little dogs in ballet frills.
All the rejoicing going on, and he, the King, a cuckold.
Later he got in the court physicians and the Prime Minister, and
sometime that night the old Archduke was located at his hunting lodge,
and brought to the palace in his hunting clothes and a state of wild
alarm.
“Two days later,” Clotilde said in her quiet voice, “the court
physicians announced that the Queen’s condition was not satisfactory,
and it was whispered about the court that her mind was affected. Within
a month they took her to the summer palace in the mountains, and later
she was sent, carefully guarded, to Italy. By that time all of Europe
believed that she was permanently—not sane.”
But the King kept the child.
One can see his problem, I think. The cheers of his subjects still
ringing in his ears; the sight of him with his heir, proud and exultant
on his balcony, still fresh in their minds. And as he frantically paced
his library, the issue growing clearer. He could kill the child or put
him away, and that must have been his first thought, or with the
assistance of Rome he could annul the marriage and marry again. But that
meant a declaration of his own infamous situation, and his pride
rebelled.
He compromised in the end, as better men had done before him. His throne
was not too secure at the best; already were symptoms of the revolt
which later overwhelmed him. The possession of an heir gave him
strategic advantage.
And he may have believed her not sane. Her very confession, so suicidal,
so inexplicable from any point of view but her own, must have seemed
almost irrational. Indeed, Clotilde says she believes he would have
discredited the story entirely, laid it to one of those temporary manias
which occasionally follow childbirth, had not the chief court physician,
after dutifully insisting that the child was premature, gone off and
blown out his brains.
But whatever he may have believed or known, he did the one thing the
girl queen had never anticipated, sent her away and kept her child. But
always he hated him.
Clotilde has a confidential letter, written to her by an English
governess when Toto, as he was familiarly called, was six.
“He is very bright and active,” she wrote. “But so lonely. Once a day he
sees the King, but only for a few minutes. And I think his Majesty is
rather severe; the discipline is military, and he has more to learn than
is good for so young a child. However—”