Majesty Part 41

She had first recognized the driver, in a dirty coat: a footman from the Imperial, whose face she remembered. Then, with a swift glance into the cab, she recognized--just close to a lamp-post with a number of ornamental branches--the emperor leaning against Othomar and her own stepson, Xardi. But the marquis did not recognize her, for, startled by the great light, he quickly turned his face away and bent, sombrely, protectingly, over the emperor and the crown-prince....

The girls had seen nothing; the d.u.c.h.ess said nothing, afraid of betraying them.... She felt all her pluck and a.s.surance forsake her; she shuddered from head to foot. She could not restrain her tears for her poor emperor, who was dying, who was returning to his palace in such a guise. A great, dark terror took possession of her. The rain trickled over her bosom....

"Keep your cloaks round you!" she again admonished her daughters.

Then she went on, dragging herself along and the girls as well, beside her, stumbling on their feet...

But a whirl of people swept across the Opera Square; there seemed to be a fight in progress: a heap of men, surrounding a group of police-constables and soldiers, in whose midst a madman wrestled with forcible gestures; a coa.r.s.e clamour rose on high. At the lighted, open windows of the opera-house, above the perystile, still decked in its bright, festal illumination, face after face, appeared, actors still in costume looked on....

"Mamma, we shall never get through!" sobbed Eleonore, softly.

The d.u.c.h.ess thought in despair of the great Empress Avenue in which their town-house stood; it was so far away: how would they ever reach it, how would they ever get home?...

"They're murdering him, they're murdering him, they shan't murder him!"

bleated the people round them.

Then the d.u.c.h.ess understood, then she saw and the girls also saw: the mob, furious, foaming at the mouth--avengers now, though at first malcontents, perhaps even anarchists: such were the Liparians!--the mob pressing against the soldiers and constables, in the midst of whom the emperor's murderer still made fight with his large, frenzied gestures.

And the avengers stormed this circle of protecting police; they dragged the man out.... They dragged him right under the eyes of the d.u.c.h.ess, of her daughters....

"Ugh, ugh, ugh!" they roared brutally, men and women alike.

They tore the clothes from his body, they beat him; and he howled back.

They struck him to the ground with cudgels and trampled on him with coa.r.s.e shoes; his blood flowed; his brains spattered from his crushed skull....

Then, at the sight of blood, they became like wild beasts; they grinned and smacked their lips with delight.

Eleonore fell back fainting against the d.u.c.h.ess, but Alexa shook her by the arm:

"Keep up, keep up, for G.o.d's sake keep up, can't you?" she cried out aloud. "I can do nothing with you if you faint!"

Her strong hands goaded the little marchioness back into life and again she dragged them on, staggering....

5

The emperor, who refused to die, lived by sheer energy for two days longer, with his perforated lungs, panting for breath.

And such were the Liparians: the man, the murderer, seized in the opera-house, despite the police and the guard, had been battered into a shapeless ma.s.s by the malcontents themselves....

And such is life: the emperor of a great country was shot dead by a fanatic in the midst of his kith and kin and life went on.... The country was as extensive as before: a rich, naturally beautiful, southern empire; tall, snow-clad mountains in the north; medieval and modern towns, lying in broad provinces; the residential capital itself, white in its golden autumn sunshine, with its Imperial, beneath a blue sky, close to the blue sea, round which circled the quays....

And such is the life of rulers: the emperor lay dead, killed by a simple pistol-shot; and the court chamberlain was very busy, the masters of ceremonies unable to agree; the pomp of an imperial funeral was prepared in all its intricacy; through all Europe sped the after-shudder of fright; every newspaper was filled with telegrams and long articles....

All this was because of one shot from a fanatic, a martyr for the people's rights.

The Empress Elizabeth stared with wide-open eyes at the fate that had overtaken her. Not thus had she ever pictured to herself that it would come, thus, so rudely, in the midst of that festivity and in the presence of their royal guest; thus, glancing past her, striking only her husband and not crushing them all, at one blow, all their imperial pride! It had come to pa.s.s and ... she still feared, she still went on fearing, more now than before: for her son!... It seemed to her as if she were fearing for the first time....

It was the day before the funeral of the Emperor Oscar, when the d.u.c.h.ess of Xara, now the young empress, was seized with indisposition and the doctors declared that she was _enceinte_.

The emperor's remains had already been removed in great pomp to Altara.

At St. Ladislas the Altarians were to see him lying in state between thousands of flaming candles, with the brilliant insignia of the supreme power at his feet; after that he was to be removed to the imperial vault in the cathedral....

On that day too at Lipara, whose whiteness took tones of sombre twilight beneath mourning decorations and flags flown at half-mast, the salutes from Fort Wenceslas echoed over the town, thundering in dull tones their regular, heavy, monotonous bombardment of farewell. Lonely, majestically, in the town resounding with the salutes, stood the Imperial, empty, with its caryatids staring with gloomy, downcast eyes.

The young emperor, Othomar XII., was at Altara, leading the solemn procession. The empress-mother was at the Crown Palace, with the young Empress Valerie.... Over their glamour, still shining, shone new glamours, in life which had continued, which was continuing still....

The two empresses sat side by side. Valerie held Elizabeth gently in her arms; at regular intervals the guns boomed from the fort, through the palace...

Then Elizabeth drew herself up painfully from her daughter-in-law's arms and spoke in low, oracular tones:

"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara.... He would so much have liked to see a Count of Lycilia...."

The guns boomed; the two empresses, in deep mourning, wept and sobbed.

And now for the first time after a long interval--as there had also been a long interval at Berengar's death--Elizabeth realized all her loss, her sorrow, her misery, her despair; and she felt that that emperor, to whom, as a very young princess, now four-and-twenty years ago, she had been given in marriage, without love, she had come to love in this quarter of a century of their life in common on his high pinnacle of sovereignty....

That evening Othomar returned and, alone with his wife, with his mother, he sobbed with them, the young emperor, whom no one had seen weeping in the cathedral at Altara. For the Empress Elizabeth had repeated yet once more:

"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara...."

And then the Emperor of Liparia had lost his self-restraint. In one lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this child of fate? Would it be a repet.i.tion of himself, of his hesitation, his melancholy and his despair?

And then with irrepressible sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the menace of the future, he sobbed out his grief for his father who had been and his son who was to be! He sobbed, with his head in the arms of his young empress, who, suddenly realizing that she must comfort him, had grown calm and looked calmly down upon him, taking their life of majesty upon her shoulders as though it were an oppressive, heavy mantle of purple and ermine and nothing more, taking it up so valiantly because there flowed in her veins as in his one single drop of sacred golden blood, common to all of their order, their might upon earth and their right before G.o.d....

6

"To HER IMPERIAL AND ROYAL HIGHNESS EUDOXIE "ARCHd.u.c.h.eSS OF AUSTRIA, "SIGISMUNDINGEN.

"ST. LADISLAS, "ALTARA, "--_May_, 18--.

"MY DEAR MOTHER,

"I cannot tell you how your letter pained me. For G.o.d's sake, do not excite yourself so and say such terrible things. We too regretted intensely that you could not be present at our coronation and that your rheumatic fever obliged you to remain at Sigismundingen; but why need you, dear mother, look upon that fever as a punishment from G.o.d? And why need you look upon it as a punishment from G.o.d that you did not see your fondest illusion fulfilled and were not able to be present in our old cathedral when Othomar, after being crowned by the primate, with his own hands crowned me Empress of Liparia? You were not there, but yet it came about: your illusion is truth, after all. And I tell you this without the least, oh, believe me, without the _least_ bitterness!... A punishment for forcing me, against my will? You must be ill indeed, ill in body and mind, poor mother, to be able to write like that: it makes me smile a little, I no longer recognize you. And let my smile bear witness that I am not unhappy: oh, far from it! Our happiness is hardly ever what we ourselves intend it to be and what we regret that it is not....

"If you were to see me, you would see that I am not unhappy. It is May, the sun is shining, the oriel-windows are open. In the distance, when I look out, I can see the Zanthos winding away in a broad, gleaming expanse of water. Close by my writing-table stands your beautiful big silver cradle; and through the closed lace curtains I can see my little Duke of Xara slumbering.... I don't know how to write all this to you, I have no command of words in which to express it fully to you; but what I feel, with this wide river landscape before me and this precious little child by my side: oh, mamma, it is not unhappiness! It is a feeling which hides a great deal of melancholy, but which hides nothing more sombre than that. And really why should it, in spite of that melancholy, not be even happiness? I am young, I am empress and I see life before me! Round about me, I see my country, I see my people: I want it to become the people of my heart, of my soul, entirely. I don't yet know how, but I want to live for this people, I want to live together with Othomar. Oh, I grant you, how I am to do that I don't yet know, but I shall find a way, together with him! And, having a husband and a child and a people, an emperor, a crown-prince and an empire, have I then no aim in life? And, having an aim in life--and such a tremendous aim!--have I not then also happiness? Is happiness anything other than to have found a lofty, a n.o.ble aim in life?

"I am so anxious to convince you. And, if you saw me here, at our quiet St. Ladislas, now that all the agitation of the coronation-festivities is past, you would believe me. Othomar loves St. Ladislas and proposes to come here every year for a month in the spring. It is considered a good omen that my child was born here, for you know the feeling of the Liparians, their wish to see the crown-prince of their country born at St. Ladislas, under the immediate protection of the patron saint.

"Othomar, however, is not here at the moment: he has gone for a few days to Lipara--of course, you know this from the papers--and writes to me twice a day. I asked him to do this so that I might be fully informed as to his state of mind. The tragedy of his father's death, the Emperor Oscar's two days' death-agony affected Othomar so violently, so violently: my G.o.d, how can I find words to describe that terror to you!

How can I still live in hope, after all that I have already suffered in my short life and seen around me in the way of terror! And yet, yet it is like that, for youth is so strong and I, I am strong, I _must_ be strong....

"I admired my young emperor, in those terrible days, for his outward calm, through which the storm-flood of all his emotions never burst loose before the eyes of the world. Directly after the funeral, the ceremony of signing the five sacred deeds; the immediate agitation of the acc.u.mulated affairs of state.... A month later, the new elections, the const.i.tutional majority in the house of deputies, the resignation of the ministry.... All this you will have seen in the papers.... After that, the birth of our son and then our coronation, at the moment when Liparia seemed shaken to its foundations! And now Othomar is at Lipara, because of the new const.i.tutional ministry.... Then Count Myxila, who does not agree with Othomar's modern ideas and who has even ventured to reproach him with some vehemence for abandoning all his father's views upon government so shortly after his violent death and who is now tendering his resignation.... Othomar will make an effort to keep him, though he himself realizes that it will not be possible.... And the revision of the const.i.tution in the immediate future, with so many drastic changes, probably with the inauguration of the upper and lower chambers, while the house of peers will continue its outward existence, but will be actually nothing more than an honorary consulting body.

These are concessions, if you will have it so, but then, you know, Othomar has quite different ideas from his father's and, when he makes these concessions, he undoubtedly makes them to the past and not to the future nor to himself....

"Life is cruel, cruel in its changes and cruel even in its renascences; and for us rulers all this is perhaps even more cruel; but the world belongs to the future....

"The Empress Elizabeth is still here: she has suddenly grown so old, so grey and very dull and depressed; and she does not know what to do: whether to remain with her household at the Imperial, to stay on here at St. Ladislas, or to retire to Castel Xaveria.... All the imperial palaces and castles are whirling through her poor head: her private properties and the crown domains; she does not know where she wants to go; we of course continue to urge her not to leave the Imperial: it is large enough to enable her to retain almost all her own military and civil household....