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.