Immediately after tea the Archduchess rose to leave the Hungarian
house, saying that she had letters to write, neglected in the morning.
She had included all in the slight explanation, but as she passed
Fessenden she raised her eyes irresistibly. He was looking as haughty
and distant as she was attempting to feel. Again their positions were
subtly reversed.
“Would you like to see my new rooms?” she asked hurriedly. “I think
them very charming. Perhaps you will come up with Alexandra--in an
hour?”
When she had gone Fessenden turned to his sister. “Wouldn’t you like
to walk about the garden?” he asked. “You do not take half as much
exercise as you should.”
They did not walk far. As soon as they reached a rustic seat out of
sight of the others, and Fessenden had made sure there were no lurking
places for eavesdroppers, they sat down, and he began at once, as if
pursuing aloud the current of his thoughts--
“The great uncle, Frederick William IV., of the Emperor of Germany was
mad, and there has been no suggestion of insanity in the family since.
That disproves not only the alternate generation theory, but that
insanity is necessarily persistent.”
“What on earth are you driving at?”
“A good many things have kept me awake at night lately, and one of them
is the uncomfortable number of lunatics in the royal and ducal families
of Bavaria.” He added deliberately: “I mean that the late Empress, and
her cousins, Ludvig II. and the present Otto, seem to hover ever behind
the Archduchess Ranata, three black and stalking ghosts.”
“I thought you knew your Europe.”
“I have no time to waste in analyzing court gossip. But do you mean to
say that these three were not mad?”
“Elizabeth was no more mad than I am, and the other two lost their
minds through specific causes. If I don’t know anything else, I know
the facts about every royalty in Europe; I have been brought up on
them.”
“Well, explain,” said Fessenden impatiently. “And don’t let your
loyalty and your imagination run away with you.”
“You must have learned that the commonplace world always revenges
itself on an unusual character by believing it mad. Doubtless you have
been called mad yourself. It is only recently that people have resigned
themselves to the sanity of the German Emperor. Elizabeth hated the
footlights as much as he loves them, and publicity has readjusted him
to the common estimate. The ever-increasing seclusion of her life
deepened the mystery and the gossip, and both confirmed those who were
not in a position to learn the truth, in the belief that an empress
who spurned a throne must necessarily have lost her wits. At the other
extreme are psychic enthusiasts--over here in Europe--who already have
begun The Legend of Elizabeth. A legend of some sort was inevitable,
for she was royal, beautiful, unhappy, mysterious, and died a violent
death. These enthusiasts knew as little of her personally as the world
in general, but their imaginations are of finer fibre, and there was
much in this lovely and romantic figure to appeal to them. No doubt, a
hundred years from now Elizabeth will be one of the most irresistible
figures of the past to the poet and the romancer, for the legend that
the members of this cult have set on foot will grow and strengthen
daily. Their belief is that she was one of those rare beings who are
too exalted for human contact, and that the development of her natural
superiority was one of the most remarkable in the psychic history of
mortals. Profoundly imbued, according to them, with the doctrine that a
man should develop his personality at the expense of every duty, every
affection, of kin or subject, she withdrew herself more and more, not
only from the world, but from her husband and children, that she might
devote her thoughts only to what was beautiful, live the inner life
alone, and develop her personality in a manner possible to most people
only after they have cast off the flesh; that her sensitiveness in time
became so great that contact with common mortals was unbearable. That
is the legend, and, mark my words, before a century has passed she will
be painted with a halo about her head. It will be only the glamour of
royalty, but the world will never suspect that.
“This is the truth of the matter--like all truth, to be found midway
between two extremes of belief: Elizabeth was a simple creature,
bright, sweet, lovely, but, although highly accomplished, moderately
gifted in the matter of intellect and strength of character. Nature
never intended her to mount a throne. She should have married for love
a man who would have been faithful to her, and lived a life without
the ostentation and public duties she hated, a life that would have
been filled with all the refined pleasures. Instead of that the poor
child was suddenly shot from her simple country home, where hardly
a whisper of the world and its ways had reached her, up to the most
formal and exacting throne in Europe. Here she was not only tormented
by her mother-in-law, but by the rapidly waning love of her husband,
to whom at that time she was much attached. She was too young and
too undisciplined to accept her fate with philosophy; nor did she
ever develop the strength of intellect and character which enables a
disappointed woman to conquer life. Life conquered her, poor thing;
as a queen and a woman she was a failure. First, while she was very
young, she ran away and sulked for several years. She returned, but
only to absent herself more and more from a life which she detested
increasingly. It is quite true that she loved the beautiful things of
this world--art, music, literature--above all, nature. In many ways
she was an exquisite creature, and in these congenial resources she
found much compensation for the constant unhappiness and the terrible
tragedies of her life. Every person of refined tastes cares less and
less for the world as he grows older. When the most excruciating
disappointments crown this natural tendency, and there is not ambition
to dominate experience, then most men and women of Elizabeth’s age
live much the same sort of life that she did; and the world knows too
little about them to call them either mad or psychic phenomena. So
much for Elizabeth--and let no one grudge her success in legend as a
compensation for the failure of her life.
“As to Ludvig--”
“A moment,” interrupted Fessenden, “what of Rudolf?”
“Rudolf had suffered frightfully from headaches for several months
before he died, brought on by the dissipations into which he plunged to
drown the miseries of his life. He was one of the most rarely gifted of
the Hapsburgs, from the first Rudolf down; he had no responsibilities
to occupy his brilliant and restless mind; he had a great weakness for
women, and they pursued him; his domestic life was wretched; he sought
oblivion in every possible way, and the autopsy proved that he had
unhinged his brain. He undoubtedly killed himself in a wild moment of
intolerable _ennui_ and disgust. That Marie Vetsera was present adds
little to the significance of his death. It might as well have been
any other woman, and Rudolf was incapable of the pathos of a romantic
suicide. As to his insanity, it was not congenital; and there was no
sign of it before he gave himself up to his last dissipations.
“Ludvig was born with no other screw loose than an inordinate
admiration of himself and the actor’s disposition to startle the world
from the centre of the stage. All little kings--and some big ones--have
a disproportionate idea of their own importance; and to realize the
extreme point to which Ludvig, after his brain became clouded, carried
this not unnatural delusion, you have only to visit his castle of
Neu-Schwanstein and look at the throne room. It was not even built
before Bavaria became a mere state of the German Empire, and yet it has
the proportions and the splendor suitable for one of the three or four
great monarchs of the earth. And this, not in his capital, but in one
of his many castles! But Ludvig’s passion for beauty, his patronage of
Wagner, and the splendid monuments he has raised in Bavaria to his
own artistic genius, make him quite worthy of the inevitable legend.
If you will look at his photographs, even those taken after he became
gross and had suffered from many attacks of insanity, you will see
that his eyes were always the eyes of the idealist. It was to this
very idealism that he owed his insanity. Above all others was the
monastic ideal of chastity, but he did not have the self-denial to live
on monastic fare; and he was a king, and there was everything in his
life to give his brain and imagination a preternatural activity. The
consequence was periodical attacks of insanity, and the accentuation of
his original peculiarities; towards the end, no doubt, he was vicious
enough. The same thing might happen to any American, although, of
course, centuries of interbreeding render the brain more susceptible to
abnormal conditions. So much for Ludvig von Bayern, who in his youth
was beautiful enough to demand from the very canvas absolution for
all his vanities. As for poor Otto--recall all you know of the Duc de
Reichstadt--I mean the young man of history, not of fiction.”
Fessenden rose and thrust his hands into his pockets, staring at the
ground. In a moment he raised his head and made the motion of flinging
a load from his shoulders.
“Is that all that has worried you?” asked Alexandra curiously.
“Yes,” he said, “that is all.”