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.