Fessenden and Ranata walked rapidly and in silence over the paths
the mountain peasants had trodden that night. There had been neither
wind nor snow for many days, and what had fallen was compact and not
too smooth for impatient feet. For a time the path was straight, and,
looking back, the irregular mass of the castle on its isolated rock
was the one dark object in the white radiance of the Alpine world.
Soon, however, a sharp turn about the foot of one of the peaks that
rose straight from the brief level seemed to fling them abruptly into
an eternity of ice-fields and endless chains of glittering crests
so high above that their fierce teeth must surely bite new pictures
into the moon that hung so close. Ranata’s arm was within his, but
Fessenden’s mind reverted to his boyhood in the Adirondacks, when he
had stolen forth to his balcony on winter moonlight nights to gaze upon
the snowy lake and peaks, and dream of their kin in the far-off Alps.
How tame that picture seemed to-night, dear as it was! That was a mild
and pleasant wilderness compared with this upper firmament of ice and
desolation, with its black forests below and on high its masses of rock
and crag that looked as if arrested in brutal warfare with each other.
In the course of an hour the path came abruptly to an end on the
shore of a small lake, from three sides of which the mountains rose
like the straight and jealous sides of a mighty jewel casket guarding
the diamond treasure of some old god of the hills. The lake, looking
smaller perhaps from the great height of the perpendicular mountains
surrounding it, was oval in shape, and its frozen surface glittered
and sparkled under the moon poised directly above. No light of man had
ever drawn such radiance from the diamond. The air was so still that
the cold was hardly noticeable. The silence was intense, oppressive,
now that their feet no longer met the snow crisply. Ranata put her hand
nervously to her head.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“Of my boyhood in the Adirondacks. To-night a thousand years seem to
have disappeared since then. And many and wild as were my dreams of
the future in those callow days when I had leisure for dreams, no
flight penetrated to the future which held these last weeks, to the
indescribable solitude of this night with you. In those days I fancied
myself a poor boy who had begun life in the orthodox log-cabin and must
end in the White House. But that I should love a daughter of the Cæsars
and hold her in my arms among the eternal snows of the loneliest of the
Alps never muttered in my most exalted moments. Life is a rum thing.”
Ranata laughed in spite of the chaotic emotions that had driven her
forth. “Which do you really love best, I wonder, the sublime or the
ridiculous? Do you know what I had almost made up my mind to do when I
came down to dinner?”
“To go to-morrow with me to Fiume?”
“To-night; as soon as the others were out of the way, and Zrinyi
could have the horses harnessed. After I left you there was an hour
in which I think I really was mad. Every fact of existence except
the possibility of being alone with you on your yacht seemed to have
been burned out of my mind. I would have sold Austria to William,
I would have flung Hungary to Roumania--there was no crime I would
not have committed to have been alone on this earth with you. And
now we are alone, and the fever is gone. I look back upon the hours
before those poor creatures came and shouted Rudolf’s name as upon
some half-remembered interval of insanity. But it was appallingly
real then, and if it came once it may come again. After our return to
Budapest--and I shall start to-morrow--I shall never see you again.”
“I still think you are unwise not to take advantage of this
opportunity. You will regret it; take my word for that.”
“Doubtless, when it is happily too late. I am ice now. I can only
describe my sensation while those wild men were begging me for Rudolf
by asking you to imagine yourself standing under that frozen cascade
over there. It seemed to me that for the first time I realized
the enormity of his crime. He could have been a great monarch, he
could have preserved his country, he could have saved Europe from
unimaginable horrors; and every gift, every duty, every ambition
disappeared into the flaming abyss of his passions. Oh, if my father
could only have died twenty years ago! That alone could have saved
Rudolf, for it was excess that killed him; the occasional indulgence
would not have mattered. And these men, and thousands like them, would
have obeyed his lightest call to save Austria from Europe, to save
it from Hungary if need be. They would come at my call. They would
laugh even at my father. And, Fessenden, above those wild heads, and
bodies like mountain beasts, I saw for a moment the pale face of
Rudolf, terrible with agony and remorse, with impotent resentment
against the law of the grave, dumbly beseeching me to continue the
work that the great invisible forces up there had sent him into the
world to accomplish. It was then that my blood turned to ice. An hour
before--and in other moments, perhaps--I had been capable of greater
guilt than Rudolf’s; for after all I have had no such temptations, no
such provocations as his. Where you have upheld me, women, from the
time he was old enough, the very girls of the court, flung themselves
beneath his feet, honored to be dishonored by the heir to the throne,
even had he been less fascinating as a man. My father had made no
secret of his own amours; there has been no more corrupt court in
Europe; Rudolf saw no necessity for restraint, and he used none.
If he had married happily all might have been well, for he was not
vicious, and his nature was very affectionate. But when does royalty
marry happily? Fortunate the prince who marries the cow. Then at
least there is one incentive the less. Rudolf had no such fortune,
and disappointment and _ennui_, multiplying themselves, drove him to
the arms of charming women who wished for nothing so much as to make
him forget, and from them to the boon companions who adored him, but
dared not remonstrate had they wished, when he drank till morning. But
what excuse had I? Only that of a passion so great and so real that
it should give me the strength of these mountains. Without it, after
gaining my wishes in Hungary, I might have become bored, indifferent,
cynical; I might even, as I felt youth passing, have indulged in amours
that no one would dare to take me to account for. I might have gone
to my coffin there in the Kaisergruft without an ideal in my soul,
disillusioned, all my original nature in ruins, reviling life, glad
to die. Now it seems to me that after the inevitable agony is over,
I have it in me to become really great in character, sustained by an
inner life and fed by a memory that will keep me young till my death. I
thought of this long ago, when I met you first, but it passed from my
mind. It was more like a dream then. I know it to be a reality now. I
doubt if there can be any such actual happiness as what I shall find in
the memories of you.”
Fessenden looked at her long and intently. If she was of many and
variable moods, the moods were of an intensity and truth which
submerged the other women in her while they lasted. And he always
responded to her deeper moments so fully and so involuntarily that only
his ever-alert brain saved him from compromising his future conduct. As
in the profoundest solitude he had ever known, he looked through her
eyes into her naked soul, he had a long moment of doubt. In that cold
ideal of fulfilled duty, with her love apotheosized and spiritualized,
might she not in truth be happier than he could make her? Her state,
and the more commonplace cause of the deep chill of an Alpine midnight,
had cooled his own blood, and muffled the passionate voices in his
imagination. For a moment he too felt the white intoxication of the
ideal of a lifetime of self-immolation on the passionless shores of
duty, forecasted the serenity with which Nature rewards perpetual
striving after spiritual heights, and compensates for the voluntary
resignation of the joy of love. He darted a glance upward and was
visited by a brief illusion: he and Ranata stood alone on the highest
peak that pierced the stars. Then like Life he compromised.
“I wish for nothing less than your full and unconditional surrender,”
he said. “If, when you have had time to know yourself better than you
do now, you tell me that your decision is unalterable, I will persist
no further. I believe that you will send for me before long, but I may
be mistaken. Perhaps I have been blinded by my love, and the hopes
with which it has inspired my imagination. There may be, there are,
of course, depths in your mind of which I have no conception. These
may contain forces that will finally shut me out of your life. If
you convince me that I should add to your unhappiness by persisting,
or that I should do you a great wrong by making you mine in spite of
yourself, then I promise you here solemnly to withdraw finally from
your life; and to be as eternally faithful to you as I believe you will
be to me.”
* * * * *
Vilma from her high window saw them return. She had watched for them,
not from the motive which had made her neighbor walk restlessly between
her window and her writing-table, but in tempestuous sympathy with a
romance against which she pressed so close. Her own heart she believed
to be a graveyard with one tomb, and she found a vicarious happiness in
this atmosphere of passionate and uncommon love that she was graciously
permitted to enter. She had seen how it was from the first, and had
done what she could to divert the attentions and the suspicion of
Piroska. Pumping had had no effect on the wary Zápolya, and Vilma, with
all her subtlety, was still in doubt as to what the possible enemy may
have seen or suspected. She had followed Fessenden and Ranata on the
night of the ball, and waited without the door leading to the private
apartments until she heard him returning; that she might be able to
assure Piroska she had been their companion and chaperon. But Piroska
had given no sign that she had been occupied during that brilliant
night except with her many partners, and Vilma dared not tell Ranata
what she had done. Gracious and captivating as the Princess was in
her new rôle, it would have been a braver than Vilma who would have
taken a liberty with her. Fessenden possessed no great charm for this
young Hungarian, who preferred a more romantic type, but if he had
inspired love in her beautiful princess she wished with all her heart
that he too were of the blood of kings. Had these two been content
with intrigue she would willingly have helped and shielded them, but
she shrewdly suspected the truth. Astounding as the fact might be, the
American wished to marry the daughter of an emperor and king. It took
the ancient pattern of her brain a long while to adjust itself to the
bare idea, but when time had accustomed her to its audacity she could,
starved soul that she was, but sympathize. She too had had an intuition
of Ranata’s state of mind when she bloomed upon them at dinner that
night, breathing passion and defiance, and she heartily wished the
Princess had slipped out of the castle with her lover instead of giving
her word to the Obersthofmeisterin to return.
She had also overheard the words of Piroska to the American, and she
had noted that the moment the Princess left the castle the sister
lady-in-waiting had pleaded the morning toothache and gone to her room.
It adjoined Vilma’s, and for two hours the friend had listened to the
steady scratching of the enemy’s pen, interrupted only by hasty visits
to the window. Vilma had lived close enough to Piroska during these
months of court life to be sure she did not keep a diary. She was now
fully convinced that she was the tool of Königsegg for two reasons:
it was worth her while, and she had intended to marry the American
when he became convinced of the hopelessness of his suit. Piroska’s
wiles had been patent enough if her hostility had not, and to-night,
as the American had turned to her with an air of conclusion and six
words which might have extinguished hope in a more sanguine heart,
the hard little face of Piroska had settled into lines of malice and
determination. She had been as gay as usual during the dinner, but the
color had come back neither to cheek nor lips, and Vilma suspected
that if the unfortunate lovers had flown that night Piroska would have
managed to follow them as far as the first telegraph station. Now, no
doubt, she was writing her long-deferred report.
As Vilma watched Ranata and Fessenden return, she slipped from the
window-seat and climbed onto the bed, still huddled in her furs. The
fire was out and the room almost cold, but she could not prepare for
sleep knowing of the plot thickening in the next room. The hour had
come to act, but what should she do? To attempt to intercept Piroska’s
letter on the morrow would be futile; Piroska would see to that. Vilma
did her justice; there would be no loose ends, as in novels, for the
good fairy to unravel. Should she walk boldly in and hurl suspicion in
her face? Vilma was too European to approve of the crude method. The
wild idea occurred to her of smothering Piroska with a pillow as she
slept, but she had a certain measure of common-sense; a tragedy in the
royal household would put an end to court life in Buda for the present,
perhaps thwart ambitions she half suspected, possibly send herself to
keep company with Piroska. She dismissed with some reluctance the idea
she was quite capable of executing, and suddenly determined to go into
Piroska’s room and be guided by events. She left the bed and knocked on
the connecting door; then, assuming that she had been answered, opened
it and entered.
“I cannot sleep,” she said, “and I heard you moving about, so I thought
you might be as glad of company as I. You are writing? How can you
in this cold? Do you know I sat up to watch them come home? Not that
I doubted they would, but I felt as if I were living in a chapter
of romantic memoirs. I may write mine some day--but you should do
that--you are so much cleverer than I.”
Piroska had risen politely and pushed a chair slightly away from her
table. She had a small pile of manuscript before her, which she had the
presence of mind not to attempt to conceal. “I _am_ cold,” she said,
stifling a yawn, “and tired. But I could not go to bed. The excitement
of the evening made me hopelessly wide awake, so I thought I would
write my long-neglected letters.”
“It has been exciting--those wild simple creatures! But that looks like
a book. Tell me--” her eyes were bright with girlish curiosity, “_are_
you writing a novel? You could! Ah! I know you are!”
“Well,” said Piroska, with a delicate hesitation, “I--for Heaven’s sake
don’t breathe it, Vilma! One is such a fool until one succeeds!”
Vilma gave an ecstatic cry, and with a movement as swift and unexpected
as that of a panther flung herself upon the mass of papers. “Let me
see! Let me see!” she cried. But they were torn from her hands and
the eyes that met hers blazed with the ferocity of a less civilized
century.
“You dare!” gasped Piroska--“you dare!”
Vilma had seen enough. “Oh, very well,” she said haughtily. “I had
no idea a book was like a tiger’s cub. It made me quite wild with
curiosity, and I am sorry we tore the manuscript. Good-night. I
would not sit up and copy it if I were you. Your tooth will be quite
frightful to-morrow.”
She swept out, and locked the door as she closed it. Piroska, too,
might be capable of using a pillow. She took down a candlestick and let
herself noiselessly into the hall. It was very dark, except for the
patches of ghostly moonlight; but commonplace fears were unknown to
this girl of fighting ancestors, of women who had suffered worse than
death. She knew that the men’s rooms were in the opposite wing, and
she traversed the long corridors between without adventure or qualm.
When she reached the wing she saw light under two doors; Zrinyi had
undoubtedly sat up to await the return of the Princess. Which was the
American’s door she had no means of knowing, but she did not hesitate.
If her knock summoned Zrinyi she would tell him that she had a message
for his guest which must be delivered then. It brought Fessenden,
however, and she stepped quickly into his room and closed the door.
He did not look as astonished as she had expected, but she told her
story breathlessly and begged him to act at once.
“It will do no good to intercept the report,” she added. “Even if you
could, she would merely write another. But let me go to the Princess
and beg her to fly with you to-morrow early. We could shut Piroska up
for twenty-four hours. If you do not take this opportunity you will
never have another. Her Royal Highness must have many enemies at court.
This will be the final straw. If she is forced to return to Vienna you
will never see her again.”
“I wish that report to go to Vienna to-morrow,” said Fessenden, “and if
you are not too tired to sit down for a few moments, I will tell you
how you can help when she is once more in the Hofburg.”