I
“I wish I had been born in Oshkosh or Massachusetts,” said the
Archduchess, with innocent humor.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” asked Alexandra. “Your
letters were long enough, but they seemed to say less than usual.”
The Archduchess Ranata Theresia took her friend by the arm and led her
to the window. The fine lace which covered it, woven with the double
eagle of the House of Hapsburg, concealed every detail of the room from
the curious below, but was a mere veil to those behind it.
“Oh, I know this prospect!” exclaimed the American girl.
The private apartments of the Hofburg look down upon the Franzensplatz,
an oblong court-yard of inconsiderable size, surrounded by flat and
dingy walls, its bare surface relieved only by a bronze Hapsburg
leaning upon all the virtues he knew not in life. Opposite is the
guard-room. In the court-yard to-day were a few tourists staring at
the bronze or the remains of the moat and the gilded armorial bearings
on the eastern side. All sorts and conditions of people, from peasants
with their market-baskets to the hurrying bourgeois and the member of
Parliament, took the short cut through the Palace court-yards, while
private carriages, with servants in mediæval liveries, and rickety
cabs, driven by reckless shouting _kutschers_, awoke the hollow echoes
of the deep portals, and clattered across the platz. From two of the
upper windows housemaids were shaking rugs, and the only ornaments of
the dreary scene were the tall well-built house-guards, who, lackeys
as they were, carried their all-round horse-hair plumes and glittering
uniforms with the elegance and distinction so indiscriminately lavished
by Nature upon the Austrian race.
“I know this scene!” repeated Alexandra. “And I usually turn my back
upon it. Why--why--doesn’t the Emperor have the private apartments on
the Heldenplatz, where at least you might see trees and the tops of the
buildings on the Ringstrasse? This would drive some people melancholy
mad. You have not been standing at this window ever since I left you,
I hope? Trotting solemnly round the riding-school is better than that.
But you seem to have been in Vienna more than usual this year. I
congratulated myself that this was the year I was detained in New York.”
“That is brutal! I have only left this prison for two months at Ischl.
Between the fire at Schönbrunn and various political reasons, we have
been here since you left--now eight months ago! And as you are my only
real companion--! I do sometimes wish I had been born an American.”
“There is an asylum in America whenever you make up your mind to run.
I have a handsome determined and adventurous brother--he has heard
of you! You have only to say the word and his yacht will be in the
Adriatic.”
“Don’t talk romantic nonsense. I’m not up to it.”
The Archduchess turned her back on the window and sat down before a
table in an upright chair. Alexandra took a rocking-chair--one of three
she had long since presented to the Hofburg, that she might always be
sure of a comfortable seat. Ranata had no idea whatever of comfort.
Her morning bath was supplied by a procession of servants bringing
the necessary amount of water in ewers--she had never seen water gush
from pipes except into a fountain, and she privately believed that
rocking-chairs were a relic of the North American Indian. But if her
apartments were as high and angular and unhomelike as those of most
royal palaces, she had a decided love of splendor, and originality
enough to avoid crimson and white-and-gold. The morbid virginal face
of young Ludvig von Bayern looked down from the wall opposite the
windows of her salon, and although she made sport of his vanity, she
gave the portrait a place for the sake of its beauty, and approved of
one form his madness had taken. The walls and windows of her salon were
panelled with blue velvet lightly embroidered with gold. The tables,
most of the ornaments, several chairs, and even the window-seats were
made from blocks of _lapis lazuli_. On one side of the lofty room were
her books--English, German, French, and Hungarian--bound in flexible
blue-and-white morocco, an unconscious tribute perhaps to her humbler
Bavarian blood. Scattered among the embroideries on the walls were many
miniatures. In the small writing-room adjoining was a large desk of
gilt and _lapis lazuli_, with furnishings of gold and blue vellum. In
this little room was one picture only, a small painting of Rudolf in
the costume of the Transylvanian sportsman. The frame of this picture
was eternally hidden under a wreath of green or flowers.
The walls of her bedroom and breakfast-room were panelled with the
Gobelins of which the Hapsburgs have the monopoly in abundance and
splendor. Her ancient narrow bed, surmounted by the insignia of her
house clutching at a mass of yellow brocade and lace, was high on a
dais. Alexandra declared that it looked like a catafalque, and was
haunted with the _ennuis_ and miseries of a hundred princesses long
since forgotten. When Ranata, sleepless and in want of sympathy,
demanded companionship, she was forced to transfer her imperial
person into the enamelled and inlaid but wide and modern bed of her
American friend, who did what she could to banish ghosts. Alexandra had
diplomatically refurnished her apartments by degrees, until now they
were those of a young American who, while extravagant and luxurious,
was studious of music and books and a devotee of light and air. Ranata
never felt at home in them, but they exercised over her a certain
fascination, for they breathed the freedom of their owner’s personality.
“I am told,” continued the Archduchess, still with an inflection of
bitterness, “that there are people who envy royalty!”
“That is your safeguard--the glamour. It is that blinding halo more
than any other cause that has made this country rise serenely after
six crushing defeats in one century. The Lord’s anointed--genial yet
remote--afflicted beyond all men, yet carefully preserved to his state
and people--alive yet dead--kind and just yet--”
She paused abruptly, for although Ranata was at times extravagantly
informal and confidential with the one friend to whom her rank meant
nothing, Alexandra, with all her audacity, never ventured beyond a
certain point. There were moments when Ranata’s ancestors rose in
her soul and peremptorily ordered up the drawbridge which the lonely
princess loved to fling recklessly at the feet of her American friend;
to taste the sweets of girlish intercourse, unrestrained by the fear
of imperilling her royal dignity or untainted by the suspicion of
self-interest. There was no honor that the House of Hapsburg could
bestow upon the American, and Ranata knew that court life was too
old a story to offer any further attractions to Alexandra. If the
Archduchess had not been fully aware that the Austrian Court was the
dullest in Europe, Alexandra would have enlightened her: her lively
friend could rehearse every word that would be uttered at a function,
the tidbits of scandal that would be murmured at royal dinners after
the terrible interval of no conversation whatever. But for Ranata
she cherished a deep and almost romantic affection, and believed her
existence to be the most tragic in the world. Had it been possible--and
it was a possibility of which she never despaired--she would have
carried her off to New York; but for the present she spent six months
of every year in Austria, and sowed seeds of which the Emperor and his
court knew nothing; for outside the privacy of these rooms she was
more European than American. Although she was now accepted as a matter
of course, for several years the haughtiest and most exclusive people
on earth had tolerated her with ill-concealed resentment, by no means
unexaggerated by jealousy; and Alexandra, feeling that the pride of her
country was involved, to say nothing of her own comfort, had succeeded
in obliterating all trace of the alien. Only an American can imagine
the force of the reaction. And this morning, returning after a long
absence to find her friend more than ever in need of the diversion she
knew so well how to provide, she was forced to pause suddenly and bite
her lip. But Ranata’s ancestors were slumbering, and the atmosphere of
freedom came subtly to her nostrils.
“If possible, my father is more of a machine than ever,” she remarked
dryly. “I sometimes think that his very remarks to me at dinner--I see
less and less of him anywhere else--are dictated by his ministers. I
don’t blame him, poor man, for being afraid to love anybody again.
If he wants to be a machine, I should be the last to deny him, and
I really believe that he now feels nothing, and is a mere automaton
from four in the morning until he goes to sleep peacefully at nine
in the evening. I wish I were a machine myself. It must be the only
refuge this side the grave. But the stupid physical fact is that my
nerve-cells are still stronger than my fibrous tissue, and I must wait
thirty years or so for Nature to do her work.”
“Your afflictions have been shocking, poor dear--”
“I am not thinking of my afflictions. No one experienced in sorrow
will ever whine. It is the future I am thinking of--to say nothing of
the present. I am twenty-eight. Except when you are here I am utterly
without companionship, unless, to be sure, when I am in the country on
a horse. Here in Vienna, as you know, I rarely leave the Hofburg--leave
these rooms only for the riding-school or some other part of the
palace; for my father--or his ministers--seems to dislike more and more
the attention I attract whenever I show myself abroad--”
She paused abruptly and gave a curious sidelong glance at her friend.
“You have been thinking of matrimony!” exclaimed Alexandra.
“Yes--twice during the past year. I have been almost tempted to
consider it--almost, but not quite. The change would be too temporary.
If there is one thing that must surpass the eternal boredom of
unmarried royal women, it is putting up with a wired automaton and
bearing his sickly children. And liberty! Now, at least, I can lock
these doors, and even my father would not force them, and my ladies are
only too glad to be relieved of my society. But perhaps I have spoken
too strongly. In solitude I have found much happiness. I can dream and
dream, and forget that not the least of my dreams can ever come true.”
She had spoken flippantly, quite brutally, but she finished with an
accent of profound sadness.
“You will become morbid if you are not careful,” said Miss Abbott
seriously. “Only the deliberately cultivated reasonableness with which
you have accepted this deadly--and ridiculous--life of yours, and the
superhuman control you have acquired over your natural impatience and
impulsiveness, have saved you so far. But thirty is a dangerous age. I
am beginning to feel it myself--wasted emotions, opportunities, passing
youth--all that sort of thing. You, my dear, grow more beautiful every
day, and your beauty has done you so little good! Gasps and murmurs as
you trail down between the tapestries of the Great Hall of Ceremonies
in the most gorgeous white gowns ever seen, or ride once a year or so
in the Prater!” She paused a moment, and then added deliberately: “Why
not cut it? It is incongruous and monstrous to see the most intelligent
women in Europe cramped in a three-by-six cage like one of Louis XI.’s
victims. What keeps you? Nothing but the silliest superstition in the
world to-day, drivelling out its precarious existence. You have your
own money. My father can double and treble it. My step-mother would
preserve you from all scandal. You could exercise your gifts and have a
career, or marry and be happy. Come along--don’t be an idiot.”
“There is just one thing you never can understand. I know you think we
are fatuous, if not mad, to believe ourselves heaven-born, divinely
appointed; but here we are, we have our inherited duties, and here we
must remain. Ourselves are the last we are permitted to consider from
our coming to our going. We come into this world with a birthright of
obligations to millions of people whose ancestors permitted us first
to mount the throne--in our case eight centuries ago! We Hapsburgs have
been threatened with annihilation, we have lost much that was precious,
the German Empire overshadows and threatens us, and God knows what will
happen when my father dies. But although our star has often turned
black, it has never gone out. It has a way of flashing up from its
embers and disconcerting Europe that suggests eternal fires--if they
are carefully watched. And it is the hearth fires that need watching.
William’s ambitions will come to nothing if our people stand firm. I
have no illusion regarding the real danger. So long as my father lives
we are safe against the worst that revolutionists can do. But Rudolf
is dead! Both Austria and Hungary detest the Heir, that cold bigot,
who has never a smile for the people. And court life will cease when
he comes to the throne, for it is not likely he will divorce that
woman and marry a princess. Only the most watchful care can save us.
The Hungarians are straining at the bit all the time, and the moment
disintegration begins William will find some pretext to march in. He
will lose no more time than Frederick lost when he saw a woman ascend a
tottering throne. Although I am permitted to take no part in politics,
I still have a rôle to play which is of almost as much importance to
my country as my father’s. One of my obligations is to make the world
believe that a princess is above ordinary temptations and weaknesses--a
tradition which the Hapsburgs have done more than any royal house to
obliterate--and that makes my personal duty the more obvious. Another
thing, as you know--to the world I am not even the individual. During
these last ten years my study has been to persuade my father’s people
that I am the conventional, safely stupid, and normal princess, to
make them forget my mother’s supposed gift to this House. If I
should do what you propose, Austria would either assume that I was as
mad as Ludvig and Otto, or, were they convinced that I had a better
brain than my sort, they would accept my act as a deliberate insult
to the monarchical idea. In either case I should loosen one more
stone in these rotting foundations of ours. Marriage out of class,
elopement, a whispered intrigue--they are accustomed to all! But a
deliberate renunciation, based on non-sentimental grounds, a flight to
America--that would be the new thing with a vengeance, and it is only
the innovation that tells. Oh, if Rudolf had lived. If Rudolf--Rudolf--”
She pushed back her chair violently, banished the seriousness from her
face.
“Enough of this infliction. I have opened the safety-valves and feel
better. Come, show me your new frocks. Are they finer than mine? What
have you brought me from New York? And the bonbons! the bonbons! Do
you know where we go two weeks from to-day? To Hungary, for the autumn
manœuvres. I am so glad! I have not been to Budapest since I was a
child. I long to go. I love Hungary. It dares to rebel, and sometimes
it gets what it wants. And our dear cousin Willy is to be our guest.
He’s bound to come with a sensation up his sleeve. Sometimes I regret
that I was not old enough to marry him, for although I fear and
sometimes hate him, life with him might have been interesting, for he
at least is a man.”