Sarolta had sunk on a hot-water cushion in one of the chapels of the
Capuchin Church, after an involuntary appeal to her archduchess to
pray no longer than she could help. The friar, a dark blur in his
brown robes, unlocked the door that opens on the winding stair sacred
to the House of Hapsburg. As Ranata carried a lighted taper in her
own hand, she motioned to him to walk behind her, and picked her way
on the uneven stones worn by four centuries of men and women who had
gone down with the dead, or to pray among the ruins of those who had
ruled and loved and oppressed, or battled in secret and impotence
with the wretched comedy of their existence. Twice before--since her
early girlhood, when her tutor in history had included an occasional
visit to the Hapsburg dust in his course--had Ranata descended this
stair: behind the coffin of Rudolf, and the coffin of her mother.
The first time she had been blind and dumb with grief; the second,
horror-stricken as she still was, she had meditated sadly upon the
conquest of life over the charming and singular woman she had known
so little. To-night, as she reached the foot of the stair, and held
the taper aloft, she was conscious of little but the cold and the dank
smell of death, which in spite of glass and lead and bronze, and robbed
of its final offensiveness, pervades the crypt. It is an odor hardly
definable; it might be the very breath of Death himself rising thickly
through earth and mould.
Ranata shuddered and drew her cloak about her, but walked resolutely
down between the long rows of sarcophagi, elaborate and ostentatiously
simple, crowding close behind the bars. She was thankful that her
father had insisted upon the escort of the friar; but when she came to
the great gates behind which Maria Theresia still reigns in the pomp of
death over those that have followed her, and her silent attendant had
turned the key, she motioned to him to remain without.
She stood for a moment looking with a curious impersonality, of which
she could not divest herself, at the magnificent leaden sarcophagus,
on its pedestal, of one of the few great rulers of Austria. The
carving and chasing, the bas-reliefs and fixtures, were so elaborate
and beautiful that she caught herself wondering how many years the
august remains had awaited their final state, or if the far-sighted
Empress had set the craftsmen to work long before her death. She was
a practical soul, and it was likely. At her feet, in the plainest of
leaden coffins, lay the husband she had loved and snubbed. About her,
in receptacles of varying art and costliness, were nine of her sixteen
children.
Ranata turned her back upon the last vanity of the ancestor who had
been a religion of her youth, and passing the equally lofty but
far less imposing sarcophagus of Franz II., with the perfunctory
receptacles of his four wives scattered near, she paused for a moment
beside the long coffins of Napoleon’s second wife, and of him who had
been called King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt--he whom the French
remembered as the second Napoleon when his cousin seized the throne.
She stared down at the lead above the dust of the little cousin for
whom she had much sympathy and compassion, knowing him to have been the
victim of court intrigues, his soul and body systematically ruined. She
wondered how much rebellion had beaten beneath that apparent docility,
how much cunning, perhaps; biding his time in his grandfather’s old
age, hating and fearing Metternich, yet neither wise enough nor strong
enough to avoid the traps that never cut his feet, and closed about
him as softly and warmly as sirens and drugs. She wondered if the
French poet had divined the secretive nature correctly, or if a true
Hapsburg brain had dissolved in the silences of the crypt; then, if the
ruined soul had been graciously relit in consideration of its youth
and ignorance; if, in some juster world, the fine brain he may have
inherited might not now in its maturity be fulfilling the purpose for
which it had sprung from a force that would still seem to haunt the
earth.
These were not the thoughts, the sulking superstitions, she had come to
evoke, and she passed on. The alcove containing what was left of her
mother and brother, with the angel between them presented by the ladies
of Hungary, was before her, but she wished before kneeling and praying
there to saturate herself with this subtle atmosphere of ancient death,
of indestructible repose, of serene and final disassociation from the
world above. This portion of the crypt is only two-thirds below ground.
A high small window admits a patch of light by day; but the glass is
heavy, and no sound penetrates. The Hapsburgs sleep as quietly as the
Pharaohs.
Ranata wandered past the brilliant silver-like coffin of Ferdinand
Maximilian Joseph, but she did not linger; she had little sympathy with
the unknown uncle whose wavering brain had cost him throne and life.
“If I had had Mexico,” she thought arrogantly, “I should have kept it.
Picturesque an object as he was with his American empire, and his brave
death, he will never be a favorite in history or romance, for human
nature despises the waverer. What the Americans call bluff is not only
the wiser policy, but makes a stronger appeal to the imagination.” She
walked down between the long rows of the lesser dead, pausing a moment
at the simple coffin of that cousin who had set her thin frock on fire
with a lighted cigarette, hastily concealed as her father approached.
She smiled with tender pity, grateful that her own parent, obdurate in
many things, was advanced in a few simple particulars.
Finally she returned to the elevated remains of the old Emperor
Franz, and holding her taper high, looked slowly about her. It was a
sufficiently grewsome sight, those piles and rows of gray sarcophagi,
most of them but stark shadows under the meagre light she carried, and
the ray of a lamp that filtered through the little window. She gave
an involuntary shudder of feminine horror, and once more experienced
a throb of gratitude for the proximity of the friar, standing beyond
the door. He had extinguished his taper and looked like a statue at
prayer. Her eye rested again on the coffin of the Duc de Reichstadt.
“Poor Franz!” she thought. “What barbarians they were only two-thirds
of a century ago! I wonder how much better we are now--they! I feel,
rather, as if my spirit had been purged down here, than packed with its
old ghosts.”
She let her taper trail on the stones. Her pilgrimage was a failure.
The night and its horrid suggestions had accomplished no degeneration
for her; she might as well have come by day, or spared at any time
her limbs the cold, her nostrils this infliction. And there she faced
and accepted the truth. What she had been was gone, what she was so
must she remain. Her brain in its absolute modernity must help her to
endure and to regulate her life; from her ancestors she would receive
no further help, neither now nor ever. From all miasmatic obsessions
rising out of the crypt in her soul she was free henceforth; the crypt
itself had vanished into that eternity so far from the corruption about
her. She lifted her head suddenly with a sensation of liberty, of
independence, which even Hungary and her intimate spiritual absorption
of her American lover had not given her. Then she went forward and
knelt at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin. She had rejected dogmas and
theologies, but she still could pray; for she had perfect faith in an
overruling power, who, if great enough to manage the universe, must
be great enough to answer prayer without upsetting the balance of His
machinery. And prostrate at the foot of the ugly bronze coffin under
half its height of brittle wreaths, that held the clay of the warmest
nature she had ever known, of the only being she had deeply loved
until now, of the Hapsburg whose light might have raised him so high
in history and had gone out in folly and dishonor, she had her moment
of profound tribute to the dead, of utter abnegation of self. When
she rose from her knees she entered the recess, and pushing aside the
old wreaths with their emblazoned streamers, the gifts of kings, and
princes, of family, and illustrious subjects, she pressed her wet face
for a moment to the head of the coffin, then walked rapidly from the
inner crypt, down the lane between the older dead, and up the stair.
Sarolta was not in her chapel, and, dismissing the friar, Ranata left
the church. The Obersthofmeisterin was in a corner of the carriage
sound asleep. The coachman slept profoundly on the box. The footman had
disappeared. Ranata stood alone in the streets of Vienna. The clock
struck one. She, a daughter of the Hapsburgs, was as free as any waif
in the city. The sensation of liberty which had taken possession of her
down in the crypt surged wildly to her head. She walked swiftly to the
corner and stood there, pushing back her hood and staring about her.
The rain had ceased, but the night was black. What was there to prevent
her from finding a cab, driving to the station, and taking the first
train for Berlin? If Fessenden were not already there a telegram would
summon him in haste. From Berlin it was but a few hours to Bremen. She
took another step forward, then almost laughed aloud. Was this the
first result of her rendezvous with the dead? But if that had been
futile, her brain and her sense of duty were still in control. She had
renounced love once for all. Moreover, her flight would mean the exile
and disgrace in her old age of Sarolta. To-morrow she would return to
Hungary and take up her work there. Now that she knew exactly on what
forces she must rely, she could hope to walk her self-appointed path
without faltering; and in gratitude for her strength, and for a memory
which the inflexible laws of her station could never take from her.
Nevertheless, she lingered for a time, walking aimlessly to and fro,
for it was the most complete liberty she had ever known, and she
enjoyed it much as a child enjoys itself the first time it runs away.
It also appealed to her sense of humor, and she would have been amused
still more could she have come face to face with her father.
And so she rejected her second opportunity for flight and actual
liberty, awakened the terrified coachman, and returned to the Hofburg.