When tea was almost over, the Crown Prince was announced. He came in, rather nervously, with hie hands thrust in his trousers pockets. He was very shiny with soap and water and his hair was still damp from parting. In his tailless black jacket, his long gray trousers, and his round Eton collar, he looked like a very anxious little schoolboy, and not royal at all.
Greetings over, and having requested that his tea be half milk, with four lumps of sugar, he carried his cup over beside Hedwig, and sat down on a chair. Followed a short silence, with the Archduchess busy with the tea-things, Olga Loschek watching Karl, and Karl intently surveying the Crown Prince. Ferdinand William Otto, who disliked a silence, broke it first.
"I've just taken off my winter flannels," he observed. "I feel very smooth and nice underneath."
Hilda giggled, but Hedwig reached over and stroked his arm. "Of course you do," she said gently.
"Nikky," continued Prince Ferdinand William Otto, stirring his tea, "does not wear any flannels. Miss Braithwaite thinks he is very careless."
King Karl's eyes gleamed with amusement. He saw the infuriated face of the Archduchess, and bent toward the Crown Prince with earnestness.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "since you have mentioned the subject, I do not wear any either. Your 'Nikky' and I seem most surprisingly to have the same tastes—about various things."
Annunciata was in the last stages of irritation. There was no mistaking the sneer in Karl's voice. His smile was forced. She guessed that he had heard of Nikky Larisch before, that, indeed, he knew probably more than she did. Just what, she wondered, was there to know? A great deal, if one could judge by Hedwig's face.
"I hope you are working hard at your lesson, Otto," she said, in the severe tone which Otto had learned that most people use when they refer to lessons.
"I'm afraid I'm not doing very well, Tante. But I've learned the 'Gettysburg Address.' Shall I say it?"
"Heavens, no!" she protested. She had not the faintest idea what the "Gettysburg Address" was. She suspected Mr. Gladstone.
The Countess had relapsed into silence. A little back from the family circle, she had watched the whole scene stonily, and knowing Karl as only a woman who loves sincerely and long can know a man, she knew the inner workings of his mind. She saw anger in the very turn of his head and set of his jaw. But she saw more, jealousy, and was herself half mad with it.
She knew him well. She had herself, for years, held him by holding herself dear, by the very difficulty of attaining her. And now this indifferent, white-faced girl, who might be his, indeed, for the taking, but who would offer or promise no love, was rousing him to the instinct of possession by her very indifference. He had told her the truth, that night in the mountain inn. It was Hedwig he wanted, Hedwig herself, her heart, all of her. And, if she knew Karl, he would move heaven and earth to get the thing he wanted.
She surveyed the group. How little they knew what was in store for them! She, Olga Loschek, by the lifting of a finger, could turn their smug superiority into tears and despair, could ruin them and send them flying for shelter to the very ends of the earth.
But when she looked at the little Crown Prince, legs dangling, eating his thin bread and butter as only a hungry small boy can eat, she shivered. By what means must she do all this! By what unspeakable means!
Karl saw the King that evening, a short visit marked by extreme formality, and, on the King's part, by the keen and frank scrutiny of one who is near the end and fears nothing but the final moment. Karl found the meeting depressing and the King's eyes disconcerting.
"It will not be easy going for Otto," said the King, at the end of the short interview. "I should like to feel that his interests will be looked after, not only here, but by you and yours. We have a certain element here that is troublesome."
And Karl, with Hedwig in his mind, had promised.
"His interests shall be mine, sir," he had said.
He had bent over the bed then, and raised the thin hand to his lips. The interview was over. In the anteroom the King's Master of the Horse, the Chamberlain, and a few other gentlemen stood waiting, talking together in low tones. But the Chancellor, who had gone in with Karl and then retired, stood by a window, with his arms folded over his chest, and waited. He put resolutely out of his mind the face of the dying man on his pillows, and thought only of this thing which he—Mettlich had brought about. There was no yielding in his face or in his heart, no doubt of his course. He saw, instead of the lovers loitering in the Place, a new and greater kingdom, anarchy held down by an ironshod heel, peace and the fruits thereof, until out of very prosperity the people grew fat and content.
He saw a boy king, carefully taught, growing into his responsibilities until, big with the vision of the country's welfare, he should finally ascend the throne. He saw the river filled with ships, carrying merchandise over the world and returning with the wealth of the world. Great buildings, too, lifted their heads on his horizon, a dream city, with order for disorder, and citizens instead of inhabitants.
When at last he stirred and sighed, it was because his old friend, in his bed in the next room, would see nothing of all this, and that he himself could not hope for more than the beginning, before his time came also.
The first large dinner for months was given that night at the Palace, to do King Karl all possible honor. The gold service which had been presented to the King by the Czar of Russia was used. The anticipatory gloom of the Court was laid aside, and jewels brought from vaults were worn for the first time in months. Uniforms of various sorts, but all gorgeous, touched fine shoulders, and came away, bearing white, powdery traces of the meeting. The greenhouses at the summer palace had been sacked for flowers and plants. The corridor from the great salon to the dining-hall; always a dreary passage, had suddenly become a fairy path of early-spring bloom. Even Annunciata, hung now with ropes of pearls, her hair dressed high for a tiara of diamonds, her cameos exchanged for pearls, looked royal. Proving conclusively that clutter, as to dress, is entirely a matter of value.
Miss Braithwaite, who had begun recently to think a palace the dreariest place in the world, and the most commonplace, found the preparations rather exciting. Being British she dearly loved the aristocracy, and shrugged her shoulders at any family which took up less than a page in the peerage. She resented deeply the intrusion of the commoner into British politics, and considered Lloyd George an upstart and an interloper.
That evening she took the Crown Prince to see the preparations for the festivities. The flowers appealed to him, and he asked for and secured a rose, which he held carefully. But the magnificence of the table only faintly impressed him, and when he heard that Nikky would not be present, he lost interest entirely. "Will they wheel my grandfather in a chair?" he inquired.
"He is too ill," Miss Braithwaite said.
"He'll be rather lonely, when they're all at the party. You don't suppose I could go and sit with him, do you?"
"It will be long after your bedtime."
Bedtime being the one rule which was never under any circumstances broken, he did not persist. To have insisted might have meant five off in Miss Braithwaite's book, and his record was very good that week. Together the elderly Englishwoman and the boy went back to the schoolroom.
The Countess Loschek, who had dressed with a heavy heart, was easily the most beautiful of the women that night. Her color was high with excitement and anger, her eyes flashed, her splendid shoulders gleamed over the blue and orchid shades of her gown. A little court paid tribute to her beauty, and bowed the deeper and flattered the more as she openly scorned and flouted them. She caught once a flicker of admiration in Karl's face, and although her head went high, her heart beat stormily under it.
Hedwig was like a flower that required the sun. Only her sun was happiness. She was in soft white chiffons, her hair and frock alike girlish and unpretentious. Her mother, coming into her dressing room, had eyed her with disfavor.
"You look like a school-gir
l," she said, and had sent for rouge, and with her own royal hands applied it. Hedwig stood silent, and allowed her to have her way without protest. Had submitted, too, to a diamond pin in her hair, and a string of her mother's pearls.
"There," said Annunciata, standing off and surveying her, "you look less like a baby."
She did, indeed? It took Hedwig quite five minutes to wash the rouge off her face, and there was, one might as well confess, a moment when a part of the crown jewels of the kingdom lay in a corner of the room, whence a trembling maid salvaged them, and examined them for damage.
The Princess Hedwig appeared that evening without rouge, and was the only woman in the room thus unadorned. Also she wore her coming-out string of modest pearls and a slightly defiant, somewhat frightened, expression.
The dinner was endless, which was necessary, since nothing was to follow but conversation. There could, under the circumstances, be no dancing. And the talk at the table, through course after course, was somewhat hectic, even under the constraining presence of King Karl. There were two reasons for this: Karl's presence and his purpose—as yet unannounced, but surmised, and even known—and the situation in the city.
That was bad. The papers had been ordered to make no mention of the occurrence of the afternoon, but it was well known. There were many at the table who felt the whole attempt foolhardy, the setting of a match to inflammable material. There were others who resented Karl's presence in Livonia, and all that it implied. And perhaps there were, too, among the guests, one or more who had but recently sat in less august and more awful company.
Beneath all the brilliance and chatter, the sparkle and gayety, there was, then, uneasiness, wretchedness, and even treachery. And outside the Palace, held back by the guards, there still stood a part of the sullen crowd which had watched the arrival of the carriages and automobiles, had craned forward to catch a glimpse of uniform or brilliantly shrouded figure entering the Palace, and muttered as it looked.
Dinner was over at last. The party moved back to the salon, a vast and empty place, hung with tapestries and gayly lighted. Here the semblance of gayety persisted, and Karl, affability itself, spoke a few words to each of the guests. Then it was over. The guests left, the members of the Council, each with a wife on his arm, frowsy, overdressed women most of them. The Council was chosen for ability and not for birth. At last only the suite remained, and constraint vanished.
The family withdrew shortly after—to a small salon off the large one. And there, at last, Karl cornered Hedwig and demanded speech.
"Where?" she asked, glancing around the crowded room.
"I shall have to leave that to you," he said. "Unless there is a balcony."
"But do you think it is necessary?"
"Why not?"
"Because what I have to say does not matter."
"It matters very much to me," he replied gravely.
Hedwig went first, slipping away quietly and unnoticed. Karl asked the Archduchess's permission to follow her, and found her waiting there alone, rather desperately calm now, and with a tinge of excited color in her cheeks. Because he cared a great deal, and because, as kings go, he was neither hopelessly bad nor hard, his first words were kind and genuine, and almost brought her to tears.
"Poor little girl!" he said.
He had dropped the curtain behind him, and they stood alone.
"Don't," said Hedwig. "I want to be very calm, and I am sorry for myself already."
"Then you think it is all very terrible?"
She did not reply, and he drew a chair for her to the rail. When she was seated, he took up his position beside her, one arm against a pillar.
"I wonder, Hedwig," he said, "if it is not terrible because it is new to you, and because you do not know me very well. Not," he added hastily, "that I think your knowing me well would be an advantage! I am not so idiotic. But you do not know me at all, and for a good many years I must have stood in the light of an enemy. It is not easy to readjust such things—witness the reception I had to-day!"
"I do not think of you in that way, as—as an enemy."
"Then what is it?"
"Why must we talk about it?" Hedwig demanded, looking up at him suddenly with a flash of her old spirit. "It will not change anything."
"Perhaps not. Perhaps—yes. You see, I am not quite satisfied. I do not want you, unless you are willing. It would be a poor bargain for me, and not quite fair."
A new turn, this, with a vengeance! Hedwig stared up with startled eyes. It was not enough to be sacrificed. And as she realized all that hung on the situation, the very life of the kingdom, perhaps the safety of her family, everything, she closed her eyes for fear he might see the fright in them.
Karl bent over and took one of her cold hands between his two warm ones. "Little Hedwig," he said, "I want you to come willingly because—I care a great deal. I would like you to care, too. Don't you think you would, after a time?"
"After a time!" said Hedwig drearily. "That's what they all say. After a time it doesn't matter. Marriage is always the same—after a time."
Karl rather winced at that, and released her hands, but put them down gently. "Why should marriage be always the same, after a time?" he inquired.
"This sort of marriage, without love."
"It is hardly that, is it? I love you."
"I wonder how much you love me."
Karl smiled. He was on his own ground here. The girlish question put him at ease. "Enough for us both, at first," he said. "After that—"
"But," said Hedwig desperately, "suppose I know I shall never care for you, the way you will want me to. You talk of being fair. I want to be fair to you. You have a right—" She checked herself abruptly. After all, he might have a right to know about Nikky Larisch. But there were others who had rights, too—Otto to his throne, her mother and Hilda and all the others, to safety, her grandfather to die in peace, the only gift she could give him.
"What I think you want to tell me, is something I already know," Karl said gravely. "Suppose I am willing to take that chance? Suppose I am vain enough, or fool enough, to think that I can make you forget certain things, certain people. What then?"
"I do not forget easily."
"But you would try?"
"I would try," said Hedwig, almost in a whisper.
Karl bent over and taking her hands, raised her to her feet.
"Darling," he said, and suddenly drew her to him. He covered her with hot kisses, her neck, her face, the soft angle below her ear. Then he held her away from him triumphantly. "Now," he said, "have you forgotten?"
But Hedwig, scarlet with shame, faced him steadily. "No," she said.
Later in the evening the old King received a present, a rather wilted rose, to which was pinned a card with "Best wishes from Ferdinand William Otto" printed on it in careful letters.
It was the only flower the King had received during his illness.
When, that night, he fell asleep, it was still clasped in his old hand, and there was a look of grim tenderness on the face on the pillow, turned toward his dead son's picture.
CHAPTER XXXI. LET METTLICH GUARD HIS TREASURE
Troubled times now, with the Carnival only a day or two off, and the shop windows gay with banners; with the press under the house of the concierge running day and night, and turning out vast quantities of flaming bulletins printed in red; with the Committee of Ten in almost constant session, and Olga Loschek summoned before it, to be told of the passage, and the thing she was to do; with the old King very close to the open door, and Hedwig being fitted for her bridal robe and for somber black at one fitting.
Troubled times, indeed. The city was smouldering, and from some strange source had come a new rumor. Nothing less than that the Royalists, headed by the Chancellor, despairing of crowning the boy Prince, would, on the King's death, make away with him, thus putting Hedwig on the throne Hedwig, Queen of Karnia perhaps already by secret marriage.
The city, which adored the boy, was s
eething. The rumor had originated with Olga Loschek, who had given it to the Committee as a useful weapon. Thus would she have her revenge on those of the Palace, and at the same time secure her own safety. Revenge, indeed, for she knew the way of such rumors, how they fly from house to house, street to street. How the innocent, proclaiming their innocence, look even the more guilty.
When she had placed the scheme before the Committee of Ten, had seen the eagerness with which they grasped it—"In this way," she had said, in her scornful, incisive tones, "the onus of the boy is not on you, but on them. Even those who have no sympathy with your movement will burn at such a rumor. The better the citizen, the more a lover of home and order, the more outraged he will be. Every man in the city with a child of his own will rise against the Palace."
"Madame," the leader had said, "you should be of the Committee."
But she had ignored the speech contemptuously, and gone on to other things.
Now everything was arranged. Black Humbert had put his niece to work on a Carnival dress for a small boy, and had stayed her curiosity by a hint that it was for the American lad.
"They are comfortable tenants," he had said. "Not lavish, perhaps, as rich Americans should be, but orderly, and pleasant. The boy has good manners. It would be well to please him."
So the niece, sewing in the back room, watched Bobby in and out, with pleasant mysteries in her eyes, and sewing sang the song the cathedral chimed:
"Draw me also, Mary mild,
To adore Thee and thy Child!
Mary mild,
Star in desert drear and wild."
So she sang, and sewed, and measured Bobby's height as he passed by the wainscoting in the passage, and cunningly cut a pattern.
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