Vienna, the stately brown city, so haughty without, so simple within.
Vienna, the city of beautiful men and women, of fastidious breeding and
dispersing forces. Vienna, the gay, the wanton, the merciless. Vienna,
the city of the dead soul; the great actress whose still perfect shell
moves mechanically upon the stage, not knowing under what sudden stroke
she may tremble and disappear. In no city on earth is life so full of
charm and yet of unreality, no city where one feels so alive and yet
so encompassed by dreams, where to the American New York is not, but a
superlative civilization with the taint of the Middle Ages in its brain.
Ranata felt something of this luscious yet corrupt flavor of her native
city as she drove from the station to the Hofburg; but vaguely, for her
contrasts were few. Moreover, her father had met her, and was talking
constantly and somewhat at random. If Ranata had not been preoccupied
she would have noticed the evident embarrassment in his manner and
his elaborate attempt at dissimulation. He was more affectionate than
was his wont; a shade less of his perfect breeding and he would have
appeared apologetic. But his daughter’s brain was heavy and absorbed by
one idea. Sarolta was driving to her own palace, and Ranata was anxious
to take advantage of these few moments with her father. Suddenly he
gave her the opportunity she wished. He remarked in the tone of one
whose masculine recesses have received a welcome illumination:
“I suppose, my dear, that you have come to Vienna to have a personal
conference with your dressmakers.”
“No,” said Ranata, and it was notable that she did not smile; “I have
come to ask a great favor of your Majesty, and I beg that you will
predispose yourself to grant it.”
The Emperor stiffened, the natural act of a monarch whose life is
passed with those that crave the royal favor. But the act to-day
was more than mechanical; there were several portentous favors this
extraordinary daughter of his might have nerved herself to ask--might
indeed have deluded herself she was in a position to ask--and the very
thought of them turned him to steel.
“Well?” he demanded.
“It is a singular request, sir, for it is for permission to revive an
ancient custom of our house. I wish to go down into the crypt alone on
this midnight and pray by the coffin of Rudolf.”
The Emperor drew a long breath of relief. There was nothing remarkable
to him in the request, for he believed his daughter to be as devout a
Catholic as himself. “How could a Hapsburg be otherwise?” he would
have asked, if questioned; and dismissed the subject. Nevertheless, he
divined that her mind must be in heavy shadow to prompt an immediate
act of devotion at some inconvenience, when any other time would have
done as well. Scrutinizing her face, he saw the change in it, even
through the disguise of a veil with heavy dots. Trained in detail, he
remembered that he had never seen her wear such a veil before. His
experienced brain travelled to the natural solution. There was truth
in the story that she loved the American; and she wished to do penance
among the tombs of her ancestors. That meant, of course, that the
affair was closed, that when she had realized the enormity of her folly
she had hastened to mortify her flesh and spirit in a worthy manner.
He had not been surprised to hear that she loved at last, but he
wondered at the security into which he had fallen during the preceding
ten years, deluded, like others, by her superb indifference; and the
evident marks of suffering he saw in her face to-day in nowise set his
heart at odds with his purpose to marry her at once. Even were he not
now convinced that she might at any moment become a menace to the Dual
Monarchy, or had he been less harassed by those that feared and hated
her, he still would have used his authority to marry her without delay.
He knew the weaknesses of his blood, and was determined that her very
obvious genius to make the world ring with a scandal should be clogged
immediately. He resolved, however, to defer the subject until the
morrow, snatching at the prospect that the midnight vigil would subdue
and chasten her spirit. He answered as if he had given her request due
consideration:
“There is no objection, if you are sure you have the strength to go
through the ordeal--that you will not have an attack of hysteria. Of
course”--in response to an indignant ejaculation--“I know you are
not that sort of woman, but it will be a trying hour. Sarolta must
accompany you to the church; she can wait for you in one of the chapels
or in the carriage. And a friar will go down with you to hold the
taper. I insist upon that.”
“Very well,” said Ranata listlessly. The friar would be an integral
part of the scene, like enough to those who had gone down with her
ancestors, dead and alive.
She sat through the early dinner with her father, but five o’clock
was now her hour for tea, and she made a bare pretence to eat. She
wondered if she would be hungry in the crypt, then scowled so severely
at her levity that Count von Königsegg, who was watching her, feared
that her suspicions had been roused by something in the dull flow of
conversation. Several of the archdukes were present, besides the many
members of the Emperor’s household, and they were mildly discussing a
crisis in the Reichsrath. The minister had greeted her coldly. He was
profoundly annoyed at the sensation she had made, and the consequent
failure of their carefully laid plans. That she would play her cards
in Hungary with the historic tact of the Hapsburgs he had made no
doubt, and that she could fascinate and beguile he had had personal
evidence; but that she had in her the elements of a public popularity,
so desirable in a sovereign, and so reprehensible in anything less
than the acknowledged heir to the throne, he had not for a moment
suspected. These last weeks had left him aghast, for he was by no
means desirous of the slightest disturbance in the present order of
things, nor to be the victim of suspicion from those who might one
day be in a position to elevate or ruin him. He had been prepared to
declare for the Archduchess if she played her part properly, and her
star shot up at precisely the right moment; but for the present he was
puzzled how to act. His instinct was to desert the sinking ship, but
he found it difficult to connect Ranata with the idea of failure; she
looked, pallid and extinguished as she was, cast for a great part--not
endowed by Nature with the finest gifts of the Hapsburgs to languish
in obscurity. He did not approve of marrying her. The Emperor’s course
must be nearly run, and she would be a valuable card to hold when the
anticipated calamities fell upon them. However, the man selected was
of Hapsburg blood; no vow of renunciation would be required of her,
and at the right moment she could be summoned forth. Perhaps it was as
well; for what to do with her meanwhile, he confessed, was beyond any
inspiration likely to visit his fertile brain. Perhaps she would be ill
for a time; she looked so unlike her usual self as to invite the hope,
and that at least would keep her quiet for some months.
Ranata, suspecting naught of these unsympathetic reflections, was
longing for the night. When she was finally alone in her rooms--those
rooms that looked like nothing outside the Hofburg except other musty
old palaces where the sun never entered--she sat down in the dark and
attempted to prepare her mind for the ghostly pilgrimage. Her sense of
drama was stirred at the thought of performing this ancient rite, but
she felt less religious than she had hoped, less ancestral, less akin
to those quaking girls who had been swept down into the cold vault of
the Capuchin by the stern arm of Maria Theresia. One had died of the
small-pox, caught from the emanations of a recent victim--doubtless the
poor little body had half-disintegrated with fright, and let the poison
in. She wondered if she would be frightened, and dismissed the thought
with an impatient shrug. Her strong soul had little acquaintance with
fear. Still she would have welcomed a premonition of it at this moment,
if it had brought on its long shadows the first mutters of ancestral
superstition--the first stirring of her stupefied Hapsburg sense. But
her thought flew to Fessenden Abbott. She wrenched it from him, and it
fluttered about among the pleasures and distractions of her months in
Hungary. She found herself longing for the bright rooms in the palace
of Buda, the bustling business-like streets of Pest. She recalled
her first and only visit to a shop, and wished she might repeat the
experience on the morrow; she had had many vivid accounts of the shops
of Vienna from Alexandra, who, untrammelled by state, or even by the
haughty usages of the aristocracy, visited the shops as often as she
pleased.
“I feel hopelessly modern, frivolous,” she thought, as she rose and
walked to the window. “But it is merely the perversity of the brain.
Like a spoiled child, it must do precisely what is not expected of it.
I thought I had disciplined it better.”
She held aside a corner of the lace curtain, and peered down into
the court-yard, and at the battered walls opposite. There would have
been no danger of detection had her room been light, for the rain
was falling heavily. The court-yard was deserted; and the scene was
intolerably dreary. A prison-yard could be no worse.
Suddenly she was seized with a wild unreasoning terror, an impulse to
fly from the Hofburg to Budapest and her many friends. A premonition
seemed to rise out of the dark and press close upon her. Her brain
tossed up the reserve, the embarrassment of her father’s manner, the
watchful speculative regard of Königsegg’s cold eyes, the sensation
of insignificance that had vaguely assailed her as she arrived in
Vienna--of stepping down from a pedestal to withdraw into a niche.
Why had she left Hungary? There she would have been safe, for nothing
short of violence could have removed her, and that they would not dare
to use. She touched the electric button as soon as she could find it;
and when the room was softly brilliant, she wondered at her nerves.
Determined to reduce them to subjection before their midnight ordeal,
she sat down with a novel Alexandra had given her at parting. This
was not the preparation for nocturnal prayer she might have wished,
but it could be no more mischievous than her own unruly thoughts. It
proved to be absorbing--a brisk well-written tale of mediæval love and
adventure, war and romantic incident, without psychology, or a reminder
of modern life and character. It was not the literature of her habit,
but for that reason perhaps held her the more closely, the tenor of her
mind being altered, and life as she knew it best forgotten. When, at a
quarter to twelve, one of her maids entered with a long fur garment,
and the announcement that the Obersthofmeisterin awaited the pleasure
of her Imperial Highness, she arose with reluctance, and, as the woman
adjusted the cloak and hood, glanced at the finish. “If I had not been
sure of that final rapture,” she informed herself apologetically, “I
believe I could not have rid my mind of it in the church.”