She rose at his entrance and, after a moment of surprise, smiled faintly. But she said nothing, nor did Karl, until he had lifted one of her cold hands and brushed it with his lips.
"Well!" he said. "And again, Olga!"
"Once again." She looked up at him. Yes, he was changed. The old Karl would have taken her in his arms. This new Karl was urbane, smiling, uneasy.
He said nothing. He was apparently waiting for her to make the first move. But she did not help him. She sat down and he drew a small chair to the fire.
"There is nothing wrong, is there?" he said. "Your note alarmed me. Not the note, but your coming here."
"Nothing—and everything." She felt suddenly very tired. Her very voice was weary. "I sent you a letter asking you to come to the castle. There were things to discuss, and I did not care to take this risk of coming here."
"I received no letter."
"No!" She knew it, of course, but she pretended surprise, a carefully suppressed alarm.
"I have what I am afraid is bad news, Olga. The letter was taken. I received only a sheet of blank paper."
"Karl!" She leaped to her feet.
She was no mean actress. And behind it all was her real terror, greater, much greater, than he could know. Whatever design she had on Karl's pity, she was only acting at the beginning. Deadly peril was clutching her, a double peril, of the body and of the soul.
"Taken! By whom?"
"By some one you know—young Larisch."
"Larisch!" No acting there. In sheer amazement she dropped back from him, staring with wide eyes. Nikky Larisch! Then how had the Terrorists got it? Was all the world in their employ?
"But—it is impossible!"
"I'm sorry, Olga. But even then there is something to be explained. We imprisoned him—we got him in a trap, rather by accident. He maintained that he had not made away with the papers. A mystery, all of it. Only your man, Niburg, could explain, and he—"
"Yes?"
"I am afraid he will never explain, Olga."
Then indeed horror had its way with her. Niburg executed as a spy, after making who knew what confession! What then awaited her at the old castle above the church at Etzel? Karl, seeing her whitening lips, felt a stirring of pity. His passion for her was dead, but for a long time he had loved her, and now, in sheer regret, he drew her to him.
"Poor girl," he said softly. "Poor girl!" And drew his hand gently over her hair.
She shivered at his touch. "I can never go back," she said brokenly.
But at that he freed her. "That would be to confess before you are accused," he reminded her. "We do not know that Niburg told. He was doomed anyhow. To tell would help nothing. The letter, of course, was in code?"
"Yes."
She sat down again, fighting for composure.
"I am not very brave," she said. "It was unexpected. In a moment I shall be calmer. You must not think that I regret the risk. I have always been proud to do my best for you."
That touched him. In the firelight, smiling wanly at him, she was very like the girl who had attracted him years before. Her usual smiling assurance was gone. She looked sad, appealing. And she was right. She had always done her best for him. But he was cautious, too.
"I owe you more than I can tell you," he said. "It is the sort of debt that can never be paid. Your coming here was a terrible risk. Something urgent must have brought you."
She pushed back her heavy hair restlessly.
"I was anxious. And there were things I felt you should know."
"What things?"
"The truth about the King's condition, for one. He is dying. The bulletins lie. He is no better."
"Why should the bulletins lie?"
"Because there is a crisis. You know it. But you cannot know what we know—the living in fear, the precautions, everything."
"So!" said Karl uneasily. "But the Chancellor assured me—" He stopped. It was not yet time to speak of the Chancellor's visit.
"The Chancellor! He lies, of course. How bad things are you may judge when I tell you that a hidden passage from the Palace has been opened and cleared, ready for instant flight."
It was Karl's turn to be startled. He rose, and stood staring down at her. "Are you certain of that?"
"Certain!" She laughed bitterly. "The Terrorists Revolutionists, they call themselves—are everywhere. They know everything, see everything. Mettlich's agents are disappearing one by one. No one knows where, but all suspect. Student meetings are prohibited. The yearly procession of veterans is forbidden, for they trust none, even their old soldiers. The Council meets day after day in secret session."
"But the army—"
"They do not trust the army."
Karl's face was grave. Something of the trouble in Livonia he had known. But this argued an immediate crisis.
"On the King's death," the Countess said, "a republic will be declared. The Republic of Livonia! The Crown Prince will never reign."
She shivered, but Karl was absorbed in the situation.
"Incredible!" he commented. "These fears are sometimes hysterias, but what you say of the preparations for flight—I thought the boy was very popular."
"With some. But when has a child stood between the mob and the thing it wants? And the thing they cry for is liberty. Down with the royal house! Down with the aristocracy!"
She was calm enough now. Karl was listening, was considering, looked uneasy. She had been right. He was not for acquiring trouble, even by marriage.
But, if she had read Karl, he also knew her. In all the years he had known her she had never been reckless. Daring enough, but with a calculating daring that took no chances. And yet she had done a reckless thing by coming to him. From under lowered eyelids he considered her. Why had she done it? The situation was serious enough, but even then— "So you came to-day to tell me this?"
She glanced up, and catching his eyes, colored faintly. "These are things you should know."
He knew her very well. A jealous woman would go far. He knew now that she was jealous. When he spoke it was with calculating brutality. "You mean, in view of my impending marriage?"
So it was arranged! Finally arranged. Well, she had done her best. He knew the truth. She had told it fairly. If, knowing it, he persisted, it would be because her power over him was dead at last.
"Yes. I do not know how far your arrangements have gone. You have at least been warned."
But she saw, by the very way he drew himself up and smiled, that he understood. More than that, he doubted her. He questioned what she had said.
The very fact that she had told him only the truth added to her resentment.
"You will see," she said sullenly.
Because he thought he already saw, and because she had given him a bad moment, Karl chose to be deliberately cruel. "Perhaps!" he said. "But even then if this marriage were purely one of expediency, Olga, I might hesitate. Frankly, I want peace. I am tired of war, tired of bickering, tired of watching and being watched. But it is not one of expediency. Not, at least, only that. You leave out of this discussion the one element that I consider important, Hedwig herself. If the Princess Hedwig were to-morrow to be without a country, I should still hope to marry her."
She had done well up to now, had kept her courage and her temper, had taken her cue from him and been quiet and poised. But more than his words, his cruel voice, silky with friendship, drove her to the breaking point. Karl, who hated a scene, found himself the victim of one, and was none the happier that she who had so long held him off was now herself at arm's length, and struggling.
Bitterly, and with reckless passion, she flung at him Hedwig's infatuation for young Larisch, and prophesied his dishonor as a result of it. That leaving him cold and rather sneering, she reviewed their old intimacy, to be reminded that in that there had been no question of marriage, or hope of it.
"I am only human, Olga," he said, in an interval when she had fallen to quiet weeping. "I loved you very sincerely, and for a
long time. Marriage between us was impossible. You always knew that."
In the end she grew quiet and sat looking into the fire with eyes full of stony despair. She had tried and failed. There was one way left, only one, and even that would not bring him back to her. Let Hedwig escape and marry Nikky Larisch—still where was she? Let the Terrorists strike their blow and steal the Crown Prince. Again—where was she?
Her emotions were deadened, all save one, and that was her hatred of Hedwig. The humiliation of that moment was due to her. Somehow, some day, she would be even with Hedwig. Karl left her there at last, huddled in her chair, left full of resentment, the ashes of his old love cold and gray. There was little reminder of the girl of the mountains in the stony-eyed woman he had left sagged low by the fire.
Once out in the open air, the King of Karnia drew a long breath. The affair was over. It had been unpleasant. It was always unpleasant to break with a woman. But it was time. He neither loved her nor needed her. Friendly relations between the two countries were established; and soon, very soon, would be ratified by his marriage.
It was not of Olga Loschek, but of Hedwig that he thought, as his car climbed swiftly to the lodge.
CHAPTER XXVII. THE LITTLE DOOR
Hedwig had given up. She went through her days with a set face, white and drawn, but she knew now that the thing she was to do must be done. The King, in that stormy scene when the Sister prayed in the next room, had been sufficiently explicit. They had come on bad times, and could no longer trust to their own strength. Proud Livonia must ask for help, and that from beyond her border.
"We are rotten at the core," he said bitterly. "An old rot that has eaten deep. God knows, we have tried to cut it away, but it has gone too far. Times are, indeed, changed when we must ask a woman to save us!"
She had thrown her arms over the bed and buried her face in them. "And I am to be sacrificed," she had said, in a flat voice. "I am to go through my life like mother, soured and unhappy. Without any love at all."
The King was stirred. His thin, old body had sunk in the bed until it seemed no body at all. "Why without love?" he asked, almost gently. "Karl knows our condition—not all of it, but he is well aware that things are unstable here. Yet he is eager for the marriage. I am inclined to believe that he follows his inclinations, rather than a political policy."
The thought that Karl might love her had not entered her mind. That made things worse, if anything—a situation unfair to him and horrible to herself. In the silence of her own room, afterward, she pondered over that. If it were true, then a certain hope she had must be relinquished—none other than to throw herself on his mercy, and beg for a nominal marriage, one that would satisfy the political alliance, but leave both of them free. Horror filled her. She sat for long periods, dry-eyed and rigid.
The bronze statue of the late Queen, in the Place, fascinated her in those days. She, too, had been only a pawn in the game of empires; but her face, as Hedwig remembered it, had been calm and without bitterness. The King had mourned her sincerely. What lay behind that placid, rather austere old face? Dead dreams? Or were the others right, that after a time it made no difference, that one marriage was the same as another?
She had not seen Nikky save once or twice, and that in the presence of others. On these occasions he had bowed low, and passed on. But once she had caught his eyes on her, and had glowed for hours at what she saw in them. It braced her somewhat for the impending ordeal of a visit from Karl.
The days went on. Dressmakers came and went. In the mountains lace-makers were already working on the veil, and the brocade of white and gold for her wedding-gown was on the loom. She was the pale center of a riot of finery. Dressmakers stood back and raised delighted hands as, one by one; their models were adjusted to her listless figure.
In the general excitement the Crown Prince was almost forgotten. Only Nikky remained faithful; but his playing those days was mechanical, and one day he was even severe. This was when he found Prince Ferdinand William Otto hanging a cigarette out of a window overlooking the courtyard, and the line of soldiers underneath in most surprising confusion. The officer of the day was not in sight.
Nikky, entering the stone-paved court, and feeling extremely glum, had been amazed to see the line of guards, who usually sat on a bench, with a sentry or picket, or whatever they called him, parading up and down before them—Nikky was amazed to see them one by one leaping into the air, in the most undignified manner. Nikky watched the performance. Then he stalked over. They subsided sheepishly. In the air was the cause of the excitement, a cigarette dangling at the end of a silk thread, and bobbing up and down. No one was to be seen at the window above.
Nikky was very tall. He caught the offending atom on its next leap, and jerked it off. As he had suspected, it was one of his own, bearing an "N" and his coat of arms.
The Crown Prince received that day, with the cigarette as an excuse, a considerable amount of Nikky's general unhappiness and rage at the world.
"Well," said Prince Ferdinand William Otto, when it was over, "I have to do something, don't I?"
It was Miss Braithwaite's conviction that this prank, and several other things, such as sauntering about with his hands in his pockets, and referring to his hat as a "lid," were all the result of his meeting that American boy.
"He is really not the same child," she finished. "Oskar found him the other day with a rolled-up piece of paper lighted at the end, pretending he was smoking."
The Chancellor came now and then, but not often. And his visits were not cheering. The Niburg affair had left its mark on him. The incident of the beggar on the quay was another scar. The most extreme precautions were being taken, but a bad time was coming, and must be got over somehow.
That bad time was Karl's visit.
No public announcement of the marriage had yet been made. It was bound to be unpopular. Certainly the revolutionary party would make capital of it. To put it through by force, if necessary, and, that accomplished, to hold the scourge of Karnia's anger over a refractory people, was his plan. To soothe them with the news of the cession of the seaport strip was his hope.
Sometimes, in the early morning, when the King lay awake, and was clearer mentally than later in the day, he wondered. He would not live to see the result of all this planning. But one contingency presented itself constantly. Suppose the Crown Prince did not live? He was sturdy enough, but it was possible. Then Hedwig, Queen of Karnia, would be Queen of Livonia. A dual kingdom then, with Karl as Hedwig's consort, in control, undoubtedly. It would be the end of many dreams.
It seemed to him in those early hours, that they were, indeed, paying a price. Preparations were making for Karl's visit. Prince Hubert's rooms were opened at last, and redecorated as well as possible in the short time at command, under the supervision of the Archduchess. The result was a crowding that was neither dignified nor cheerful. Much as she trimmed her own lean body, she decorated. But she was busy, at least, and she let Hedwig alone.
It was not unusual, those days, to find Annunciata, flushed with exertion, in the great suite on an upper floor, in the center of a chaos of furniture, shoving chairs about with her own royal arms, or standing, head on one side, to judge what she termed the composition of a corner. Indignant footmen pushed and carried, and got their wigs crooked and their dignified noses dirty, and held rancorous meetings in secluded places.
But Annunciata kept on. It gave her something to think of in place of the fear, that filled her, made her weary enough to sleep at night.
And there was something else that comforted her.
Beyond the windows of the suite was a flat roof, beneath which was the ballroom of the Palace. When the apartment was in use, the roof was made into a garden, the ugly old walls hidden with plants in tubs and boxes, the parapet edged with flowers. It was still early, so spring tulips were planted now on the parapet, early primroses and hyacinths. In the center an empty fountain was cleared, its upper basins filled with water vines, it
s borders a riot of color. When the water was turned on, it would be quite lovely.
But it was not the garden on the roof which cheered Annunciata. It had, indeed, rather sad memories. Here had Hubert's young wife kept her cages of birds, fed with her own hands, and here, before Otto was born, she had taken the air in a long chintz-covered chair.
Annunciata, overseeing the roof as she had overseen the apartment, watched the gardeners bringing in their great loads of plants from the summer palace, and saw that a small door, in a turret, was kept free of access. To that door, everything else failing, the Archduchess pinned her faith. She carried everywhere with her a key that would open it.
Long ago had the door been built, long ago, when attacking forces, battering in the doors below, might swarm through the lower floors, held back on staircases by fighting men who retreated, step by step, until, driven at last to the very top, they were apparently lost. More than once; in bygone times the royal family had escaped by that upper door, and the guard after them. It was known to few.
The staircase in the wall had passed into legend, and the underground passage with it. But they still existed, and had recently been put in order. The Chancellor had given the command; and because there were few to be trusted, two monks from the monastery attached to the cathedral had done the work.
So the gardeners set out their potted evergreens, and covered the primroses on the balustrade against frost, and went away. And the roof had become by magic a garden, the walls were miniature forests, but the door remained—a door.
On a desperate morning Hedwig threw caution to the winds and went to the riding-school. She wore her old habit, and was in the ring, but riding listlessly, when Nikky and Otto appeared.
"And eat." Nikky was saying. "He always eats. And when I take him for a walk in the park, he digs up bones that other dogs have buried, and carries them home with him. We look very disreputable." The Crown Prince laughed with delight, but just then Nikky saw Hedwig, and his own smile died.
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