XII
Fessenden sat over his coffee on the terrace of his hotel in Pest, and stared up at Buda with little appreciation of its evening beauty. The sunset glow still lingered, pushing forward the dark masses of the Schwabenberg, where brilliant points of light were appearing among the dim outlines of the villas. On the long ridge above the Danube, and the abrupt irregular heights beyond, lights were darting forth rapidly, and one wing of the palace was illuminated. The irregular groups and single dots of fire gave the fissures and cliffs, the ruins of the citadel on its isolated height far to the left, and the beautiful outline of the palace a dark and savage grandeur. On the rough side of the cliff, far below the citadel, was a mass of lights like a meteor fallen upon a void, so dark were the woods and rocks about the little kiosk where men and women drank their iced coffee to the music of the gypsies. Along the ridge on the right of the palace were the melting outlines of public buildings, of ancient churches, the arches of the chapel abovethe dust of Shêkl Gül Baba, which alone commemorates the century and a half of Turkish occupation, and the modern structures which cover the baths the Romans built two thousand years ago. Down on the riverbank, in the shadow of the precipitous gardens of the palace, the cafés were brilliantly alight, and the music of cymbal and fiddle floated over to Pest and mingled with the strains of the gypsy band in the hotel behind Fessenden.
On the long line of terrace before the hotels of Pest, hundreds sat at little tables smoking and drinking their coffee. On the wide promenade in front many more sauntered, the women gayly and fashionably dressed, many of them beautiful, animated—bewitching, no doubt, to the fine-looking men who accompanied them. Fessenden had a fervent admiration for the women of Hungary, and he had sat at this same table during former visits and observed them with pleasure. But to-night his eyes rarely wandered from the balcony at the southeast extremity of the palace, where several figures were discernible, and the regular rising, lingering, disappearing of what might have been the travail of a miniature volcano. The volcano, doubtless, was the Princess Sarolta of Windischgrätz, for the figures had moved from time to time, and there appeared to be no man among them. Once the tallest of the group had entered the room at the corner and stood for a moment against the light. Fessenden, his heart beating faster, had fancied he recognized the Archduchess, and had half risen in angry determination to cross the river and storm the hill, but had thrown himself back in his chair and ordered another glass of iced coffee.
Nevertheless, his anger did not cool nor his determination weaken. It was now three days since he and Ranata had surrendered themselves to the wild exhilarationof the Chardash, and he had not even received permission to call on his sister in the palace. Alexandra had written him that the Archduchess was doubtless very angry, as she had ignored the day in the village as completely as if her memory had failed her, and every one was in doubt as to the manner in which they were to dance the Chardash at the ball. “But the ball will take place,” Miss Abbott had added, “and if you will possess your soul in patience and remain here, I shall make a very especial point of your coming. She can hardly refuse. Indeed, she would know that if she did it would be the end of our friendship. I refuse to look ahead in this matter. I have always known that something would happen when you met. It is all on the knees of the gods. The twentieth century is not the eighteenth nor yet the nineteenth. For my part, I want to see history make itself, and the past, I hold, is merely designed by the inexorable law of progress as a background for the present. There will be an American queen in Europe yet. I am glad I am young—and I love you both.”
She had asked Zrinyi and Prince Illehazy to call upon him, and he had pressed a tailor into hasty service and dined with them at the Park Club on successive evenings. He knew that he must meet the Archduchess before long, for both these nobles had designed entertainments in her honor, nor was it likely that she would refuse his sister’s request. But he was not possessing his soul in patience. He was used to personal activity in the levelling of obstacles; moreover, the resentment of the Archduchess seemed to him the most erratic manifestation of feminine perversity to which man had ever been subjected. If she choose to dress herself as a peasant and dance with peasants, what right had she to vent her anger upon him for dancing with her as respectfully asthe most courteous among them? He had chosen to ignore her state, and no course could have been more consistent. He would not apologize, for he had done nothing culpable; he was as entitled to incognito as herself. To vent her wrath on him for a situation of her own making was a caprice so far unworthy of her character, as he understood it, that he was inclined to believe there was a misapprehension of which he knew nothing. By which it will be seen that there were many things Fessenden knew better than woman.
Whether he was in love with the Archduchess of Austria or not he was at no pains to discover. But his instinct for adventure was now on edge—the youth in him was rampant; New York was non-existent; his weeks of rest in Europe, passed almost entirely in solitude and sunshine, had made his pulses full and quick; he was ready for anything, and his will had never set itself more squarely. Here were all the high elements of romance at last; moreover, when he awakened in the night and heard the distant wail or rush of the Chardash, he trembled and experienced a sensation of being stabbed by something that was both sharp and sweet.
The attitude of the Archduchess, the insurmountable barrier she had raised, but whetted his determination to know her. With all his contempt for monarchy, he was still too wise in its ways to make the mistake of republican approach. He was unconventional, but he was also a man of the world; while he would not hesitate to insist upon talking with any sovereign as man to man, with no more formality than he would yield to the President of the United States, he knew that to walk up to a palace door and demand admittance, even to his sister’s apartments, would be merely to make an ass of himself. Moreover, he had long since learned that oneof the secrets of man’s victory over life is never to court certain failure.
The afternoon before, he had crossed over to Buda and walked all round the palace. The great gates on the Danube looked impervious to battering-rams. On the farther side of the court-yard the central portion of the palace, which was of a symmetrical height in front, was built straight down to the street behind in no less than eighteen tiers of rooms. There were guards everywhere, and it looked as impregnable as a fortress. The gardens surrounded the front and south of the palace. At the north end were more guards, and just without the great court-yard, easy of access at its northern extremity, its southern gates closed upon the private gardens, was the guard-house. Connecting the vast front of the palace with the mass at the rear of the court-yard were galleries and many rooms. The private apartments of the royal family did not look upon the court, but were in the extension beyond it, above that sacred portion of the grounds to which the public was never admitted. No princess had ever been more securely intrenched. The wild idea of disguising himself as a working-man, and obtaining entrance to the portion of the palace as yet unfinished within, had invaded Fessenden’s brain and been dismissed. In that huge labyrinth a man would be lost and found many times before he was escorted to the guard-house.
Fessenden, who liked a good story, had read the romances of the day which dealt with the imaginary modern princess of the imaginary modern kingdom, thrilling scenes of rescue, hair-breadth escapes, revolutions. They had been in his mind as he whimsically examined the palace, but they were no guide for him, even had he been of a less practical turn of mind. Were there a revolution in Budapest, none would be safer than theArchduchess. There would be no hair-breadth rescue from that palace, unless, indeed, of himself. There was no moat, no drawbridge. The walls were ever visible to more than guards. He would meet her at balls, at dinners; a word alone with her in the garden or a corner of a balcony would seem to be all that he might anticipate. Nevertheless, the situation was romantic enough to keep him in Budapest; nor, he suspected, was Ranata a woman who needed romantic accessories; she would doubtless have interested him similarly in his father’s house in New York. She was evidently a creature of many sides, an infinite number of ingredients mixed into a not altogether harmonious whole. As Fessenden caught himself sentimentally wondering if she were the isolated being of whom he had dreamed, and who like himself lacked completeness, he remembered that he had promised Zrinyi a game of Csendes—the Hungarian poker—at ten o’clock; but as he strolled up to the Nemzesi Casino he vowed anew that he would know the daughter of the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary if he had to run the gamut of all the conventions.