For twenty-four hours Ranata’s brain whirled to no machinery but
her wrath. To that succeeded an energetic desire to escape. All her
prejudices and separate ambitions had gone down in that final moment
of disillusion, and she was determined to marry Fessenden Abbott as
soon as she was beyond the reach of her father. But her brain, fertile
as it was, and abnormally active, could conceive no method of leaving
unobserved that great palace of many corridors never for a moment
deserted. She was forced to relinquish her intention to bribe the
guards, for there were constantly three together, and it would seem
that they were changed every half-hour. To assume the disguise of a
servant was equally impracticable, for not one of those in attendance
upon her reached her shoulder, and they were as closely watched as
herself. Her rooms were not high above the ground, but a guard paced
beneath her window day and night, and the guard-room was opposite. She
was in the very heart of a great European capital preeminent in science
and art, the civilized virtues and vices, not a hundred yards from cabs
and crowded streets, and no mountain fortress could enclose her more
securely.
When Maria Leopoldina arrived, after a delay welcome to both, Ranata
greeted her with some warmth, but frankly asked her to remain in her
own rooms as much as possible. This the duenna was more than willing to
do. Not only had she returned to her exacting post from her pleasant
retirement with a reluctance she dared not express to her sovereign,
but she had a very considerable understanding of her former charge,
and was by no means unsympathetic. She recognized the necessity of
drastic measures in so lamentable a state of a princess’s affections
and temper, and she should do her duty cost her what it might; but she
would obey the letter of her instructions only, and leave the prisoner
such freedom as she still could find within her own walls.
And then the days dragged themselves out. Ranata saw no one but her
cousin and servants, received no message from the world; even Maria
Leopoldina was not permitted the solace of a newspaper. Ranata seldom
sat down, but moved about until all her body ached with weariness,
pausing every few moments to look down upon the Franzensplatz, through
the sheltering lace of the curtain, in the hope that Fessenden Abbott
would saunter through with intent to give her courage. If she tried to
forget her plight in a book she would fling it down presently and fly
to the window lest she miss him.
In these first hours she was too hard for lovers’ regrets, so wroth
was she at the insult put upon her individuality, and so great her
astonishment that with all the intellect and character of which she
had vaunted herself she was as helpless to move in behalf of her own
destiny, as poor in resource, in these primitive circumstances to
which her father and sovereign had reduced her, as any little fool of
the Middle Ages. Although she had been warned by her opportunities of
close observation against the devouring and repulsive selfishness of
those who pushed the _culte du moi_ to its modern limits, yet few women
had so proudly developed their individuality, few had so jealously
insisted upon the right of the brain to its own thoughts, of the
character to develop in its own way and as far as human limitations
would permit. If she had until her visit to Hungary been submissive
to the laws of her position it had been because she had deliberately
chosen submission, and aloofness, as her part, as her highest duties to
her house; not because she stood in the slightest awe of her father, or
recognized his right to direct her thoughts and conduct. It is doubtful
if she could have loved Fessenden Abbott had she not recognized in him
a spirit as free as her own, and an enlightenment and a sympathetic
understanding which would never seek to change nor control her. She
had found a mate, not a master, and both being the extreme products of
their century, their prospects of a lifelong desire for partnership
exceeded those in the great restless sea of awakened intelligence
between the highest type and the commonplace. Ranata, in more
passionate hours of longing and anguish, had felt the possibilities she
relinquished, rather than grasped them with her reason, but now she
knew their full significance, and the knowledge helped her to deeper
indignation of the mediæval conditions into which she had abruptly been
thrust.
The days passed and the lover gave no sign that he was as distraught
as the prisoner. There are times in life when one lives very fast.
The first forty-eight hours of her imprisonment consumed the mental
energies of months. As the first excitement decreased, and with it
something of the novelty of her situation, her mind was free again for
thoughts and dreams she had been half glad to forget, so many were the
pangs they had held. And in the train of love came all the doubts and
tragic conceptions with which a woman cursed with imagination never
fails to torment herself. The women for whom men would most willingly
die--if there be yet that spirit abroad in the world--women who in
the end are most sure to discard the still ardent lover, often suffer
in their imaginary tragedies as intensely as their more constant and
less valued sisters in their hopeless realities. Ranata was not the
woman to love and tire, but her imagination was the least controlled
of her faculties. She descended into the very depths of depression
and convinced herself that Fessenden Abbott had taken her at her word
and returned to America before any one had suspected her imprisonment
and sent him warning. (The faithful maid had not dared to confess her
eavesdropping.) She might be confined here until she lost her reason,
and he would drown his thoughts of her in the hideous details of
business, or in those great schemes of his, remembering her only as
a purified spirit; likely enough, wearying of the cold picture. She
forgot her ideals, even her instinctive knowledge of him, and treated
his vows with cynicism. What man in this practical modern world--and
the world was practical and modern outside of the Hofburg--would be
faithful to the woman hidden forever from his sight? He would marry,
of course, and forget her; why, indeed, should he not? And what if
he did? There were times when she hated him, when in the prolonged
contemplation of his commonplace infidelity she despised him as
unworthy of her, and hardened her heart until she doubted if it ever
would melt again, even if he suddenly appeared and took her in his
arms.
These crises in a woman’s brain are very unfortunate, and when men are
wiser they will study to prevent them. After all, it is the psychical
experience that tells, not the visible cause, and the scars may be
deep and callous. In this case poor Fessenden was helpless, and Ranata
had still felt and known so little that she had elasticity enough to
survive several such crises without the worst effects; but if life had
added bitterness to her store of experience she might have come out of
her ordeal with her best prospect for happiness blasted.
Time cured this mood; but the passing of doubt and the restoration of
the lover to favor helped her little to serenity. She recalled every
look, the tones of his voice, every moment they had snatched together,
all that he had taught her. She remembered every trick of speech and
expression, the lighter but still personal habit they had fallen into
of sitting apart for a few minutes after the tea-hour, while the others
were drinking their coffee in one of the reception-rooms, at the opera
and theatre, or riding to the Schwabenberg in the early morning.
These had become established habits, and she regretted them almost as
intensely as the more concentrated moments; she had known to the full
the tantalizing sweetness of the intimate understanding in a crowd.
And she recalled all she knew of him through the stories he had told
her of himself in the years before they had met. They revealed him in
many phases, and she had often lingered on them when alone. But there
was one that now seemed to be always in her brain, to rise vividly in
the brief moments when she was not struggling with a passion of grief,
of regret, above all striving to tear her mind from the uncertainty,
the maddening inability to act.
It was a brief graphic story of an adventure in a mountain-pass in
Venezuela, when with three or four men he had been set upon by half
a score of the threatened dictator’s followers. The case had been
desperate, there had been a few moments when he had never expected
to see a wider sky again, and in those moments it was not so much he
that had fought as Life itself. His pistol emptied, stabbed, shot,
his clothing almost off his back, he was dragged to and fro on the
rough mountain-road, hacking, struggling, hating, not a harking in him
to his old love of the fight in that gasping tortured wrestle with
Death himself; possessed only by the furious determination of Life to
persist, to win against the enemy that never for an instant sleeps on
its trail--so that the wonder is man lives a month from birth. At the
end it had seemed to him that he saw the two ancient enemies at each
other’s throats.
Fessenden’s face had been composed enough as he told the story, but her
imagination had visioned it set and desperate, pictured the swollen
chords of his neck, the muscles on his half-naked and bleeding body
bulging with rage and resistance. His eye had glazed as Keene arrived
and put the assassins to flight, and he had sunk into unconsciousness
in bitterness and resentment, believing that he was dying. None of
his stories of brilliant and reckless adventure had stirred her like
this glimpse into his primeval depths, depths which in the lower types
make for ruin, and when rarely in the ken of the great forces of soul
and brain are chief among the main-springs of a man’s conquest over
Life. The oftener this picture recurred to her, the face convulsed, or
indomitable and grim, of the man she understood so well, the more was
she persuaded that something had happened to still his energies, or he
would have made her a sign before this. It had not needed that story to
convince her that his courage would never fail him, but it now served
the purpose of suggesting a similar strait where a wild revolt against
death availed him nothing.
It needed only a shock to send the blood to her head and deliver her
nerves from the control of her will, which had struggled hard to keep
in office. The shock came, and Maria Leopoldina was the apologetic
medium. She entered Ranata’s sitting-room on the sixth morning of the
imprisonment with a newspaper, and pointed to a marked paragraph. The
news item stated that the famous American, Herr Abbott, had sailed on
his yacht from Trieste for New York on the previous day.
Then it was that the blood flew to Ranata’s head and stayed there. It
disorganized her will, almost her powers of consecutive thought. A
moment of forgetfulness and the tide of feeling, of terrified emotion,
poured upward again, shaking her body and racking her nerves. She slept
but a few hours at night, waking with a load of despair and terror
in her brain. Her desperate efforts at self-control, her prayers for
strength, were of no avail; for it must be remembered that mental
suffering is a physical thing after all, psychical as may be the
heights it is flung upon, and, until it has spent itself, as little to
be controlled as a fever of the body. There was a constant effort in
her throat to gasp, and moments of such utter and tumultuous despair
that it seemed to her she saw straight into the soul of her brother
during his last tormented moments. For it is in such depths of mental
suffering, when the passions are in absolute control of the brain,
and the victim if not mad might as well be, that life is taken. The
strength in Ranata’s soul fought dumbly and persistently for mastery,
and won in the end, but a weaker woman, with imagination and passions
as strong, would have killed herself.
Finally she demanded of Maria Leopoldina--blissfully ignorant of
the tragedies enacting within the hard exterior of her charge--a
sleeping-potion; and the stewardess, when she returned with it, brought
also the information that as a hasty marriage would undoubtedly cause
a scandal exactly similar to that which had entertained Europe upon the
informal exit into matrimony of the late wife of the Archduke Aloys
Franz, it had been determined that the ceremony should not take place
until two months hence. The official announcement of the engagement
would be made presently, however, and until the day of the wedding she
must remain in her rooms.
“Why, now that Mr. Abbott has gone?” asked Ranata. “Why deprive me of
my liberty when I could make no use of it?”
“I cannot say, my dear,” answered Maria Leopoldina. “It would not take
him long to come back, you know; and then you have not given your
formal consent to marriage with Aloys.”
“That is a point I had quite forgotten,” said Ranata dryly. “I hope my
father and my prospective husband are not unduly impatient.”
On the following day, after the surcease of the sleeping-powder, and
the inevitable reaction from many days of torment, she felt almost
light-hearted and frivolous, and wondered if it were possible to
suffer like that more than once in a lifetime. Passing a window her
eye was idly attracted by the shabby figure of a tourist. It was a
bright winter’s day, and visitors to the great capital came to look
at the fine bronze of old Emperor Franz and the gilded wall where the
drawbridge had been. Ranata envied them deeply, nameless as no doubt
they were--she had a vague idea that all sight-seers were a composite
with a number--for they had their precious liberty, no doubt belonged
to such free and happy countries as England and America.
This insignificant little woman carried a Baedeker, which she read
industriously, walking round and round the statue, with but an
occasional upward glance at the work of art. Alexandra had told Ranata
of tourists who read their Baedekers on the Rhine, forgetting to look
at the historic monuments described, and she watched this illustration
with some amusement. Suddenly her brows met, and she drew closer to the
window. There was something oddly familiar in the little deliberate
steps, in the fashion of opening and closing the book. And this tourist
had been here on other days, when her brain was too surcharged to piece
impression to thought! In a moment the girl paused with her back to the
window, and, raising her hand, nervously twisted a curl on the right of
her neck. It was Vilma Festetics.
She turned, her curious tourist eye roving over the ugly wall of the
palace, concealing unimaginable splendors! She even sighed, and let her
mouth fall with discontent. Ranata shook the edge of the curtain. Vilma
came forward laggingly, her eyes on her book. The guard was inspecting
the peculiar antics of another tourist, who had a bulge beneath his
coat. When Vilma was directly beneath the window Ranata threw it open
and leaned out.
“He has not gone,” said Vilma distinctly, “and he wants your answer
before he proceeds further.”
And Ranata answered as distinctly: “Yes. Yes. Yes.”
It was all over in an instant. Vilma had shot through the archway and
mingled with the throng in the Michaelerplatz and Ranata had closed her
window before the astounded guards realized they had been outwitted.
Ranata sat down to await the consequences of her act. Her heart sang,
and she did not care in the least what they might be. Indeed, closer
imprisonment, probably a change of quarters, was the worst she had
to fear; her father was not benighted enough to put her in solitary
confinement, nor even on bread and water. She wondered at her doubts,
at her facile acceptance of a news item that no doubt had been inserted
by order of the Emperor. She knew now that Fessenden had made his plans
and that he would not fail. She looked back in amazement at the power
and instinct of woman to torment herself, and she also felt a throb
of satisfaction that she should not grow old and ugly in the course
of a month, as she had fully expected to do. Finally she shed tears
of wondering gratitude, and for a few moments felt as humble as a man
could wish.
* * * * *
It was not until two days later that Maria Leopoldina announced
herself to the Archduchess at an early hour, and with an air of deep
depression imparted the information that they were to leave Vienna on
the following morning.
“I infer that we are bound for the country,” said Ranata smiling. “It
is unfortunate that you should hate it as much as I love it. Cannot
some other trustworthy duenna be found?”
The Obersthofmeisterin shook her head with gloomy pride. “How many
people has his Majesty had reason to trust? I may not be as brilliant
at Sarolta, but I shall live and die in the confidence of my sovereign.
And as I have borne so many crosses in this life, I may perhaps hope
for compensation in the next.”
“Where there will be no kings?”
“I see no fault in our august relative,” said Maria Leopoldina
hurriedly.
“I should not tell him if you did. Where are we going?”
“That, I deeply regret to say, I am not permitted to tell you until we
are in the train. But we are going not only because you have had the
misfortune to incur the royal displeasure, but because, as you are not
to be married immediately, his Majesty fears for your health if you
are confined too long in-doors.”
Ranata drew a long breath. “To live out of doors again! Even alone it
will be the next best thing to the Atlantic Ocean on a yacht.”
“What?” demanded the stewardess sharply.
“Oh, you will not have to go to sea with me; and you will be rid of me
sooner than you think.”
On the following morning, Ranata, accompanied only by Maria Leopoldina,
three officers of the Emperor’s household, and her servants, left
Vienna, not in the Emperor’s private car but in ordinary railway
carriages reserved for her use. She wore the plainest of her
travelling-frocks, nor was there anything in the appearance of her
modest suite to attract attention; and in the heavy fog of daybreak
even the mounted escort that guarded her to the station passed
unnoticed.
When Vienna was an hour behind them Maria Leopoldina informed the
prisoner that they were bound for the Adriatic, for the castle of
Miramar, built by Maximilian several years before his departure for
Mexico. The information gave Ranata pleasure, for she had never seen
the beautiful home from which her uncle had sailed to his romantic
and ignominious fate. Her father and mother had avoided it since long
before her birth, but she knew that the castle was as comfortable as it
was magnificent, and that there were grounds in whose labyrinths she
could walk for hours without the monotony of repetition. Suddenly she
had an inspiration.
“Did my father order Mr. Abbott’s yacht to leave Trieste?” she asked.
“Ah!--well, it can do no harm--he did.”
“Where is it?”
“That I do not know. I think his Majesty has not inquired--so long as
it is not in Austrian waters.”
“Does my father expect to keep my departure, my residence at so
conspicuous a spot as Miramar, a secret?”
“That will not matter. There will be an official announcement made that
you are gone to the sea to recuperate from an attack of the influenza,
and a man-of-war has been ordered to Trieste; it will anchor off the
castle. The guard in the castle and grounds has been quadrupled from
the garrison at Trieste. Moreover--I will tell you all, as it can do no
harm--Mr. Abbott has given his _parole d’honneur_ that he will make no
attempt to carry you off; he wished you to be removed to the country,
it seems. He has had the audacity to ask your hand of his Majesty. I
suppose he is of unsound mind, poor young man.”
And Maria Leopoldina had the profound satisfaction of writing to her
sovereign and cousin that evening that his daughter had received this
proof of American absurdity and presumption with a peal of laughter
which had warmed her own heart, heavy with responsibility, and with
sympathy for his most gracious majesty.