XVII
Immediately after tea the Archduchess rose to leave the Hungarian house, saying that she had letters to write, neglected in the morning. She had included all in the slight explanation, but as she passed Fessenden she raised her eyes irresistibly. He was looking as haughty and distant as she was attempting to feel. Again their positions were subtly reversed.
“Would you like to see my new rooms?” she asked hurriedly. “I think them very charming. Perhaps you will come up with Alexandra—in an hour?”
When she had gone Fessenden turned to his sister. “Wouldn’t you like to walk about the garden?” he asked. “You do not take half as much exercise as you should.”
They did not walk far. As soon as they reached a rustic seat out of sight of the others, and Fessenden had made sure there were no lurking places for eavesdroppers,they sat down, and he began at once, as if pursuing aloud the current of his thoughts—
“The great uncle, Frederick William IV., of the Emperor of Germany was mad, and there has been no suggestion of insanity in the family since. That disproves not only the alternate generation theory, but that insanity is necessarily persistent.”
“What on earth are you driving at?”
“A good many things have kept me awake at night lately, and one of them is the uncomfortable number of lunatics in the royal and ducal families of Bavaria.” He added deliberately: “I mean that the late Empress, and her cousins, Ludvig II. and the present Otto, seem to hover ever behind the Archduchess Ranata, three black and stalking ghosts.”
“I thought you knew your Europe.”
“I have no time to waste in analyzing court gossip. But do you mean to say that these three were not mad?”
“Elizabeth was no more mad than I am, and the other two lost their minds through specific causes. If I don’t know anything else, I know the facts about every royalty in Europe; I have been brought up on them.”
“Well, explain,” said Fessenden impatiently. “And don’t let your loyalty and your imagination run away with you.”
“You must have learned that the commonplace world always revenges itself on an unusual character by believing it mad. Doubtless you have been called mad yourself. It is only recently that people have resigned themselves to the sanity of the German Emperor. Elizabeth hated the footlights as much as he loves them, and publicity has readjusted him to the common estimate. The ever-increasing seclusion of her life deepened the mystery and the gossip, and both confirmed those who were not in a position to learn the truth, inthe belief that an empress who spurned a throne must necessarily have lost her wits. At the other extreme are psychic enthusiasts—over here in Europe—who already have begun The Legend of Elizabeth. A legend of some sort was inevitable, for she was royal, beautiful, unhappy, mysterious, and died a violent death. These enthusiasts knew as little of her personally as the world in general, but their imaginations are of finer fibre, and there was much in this lovely and romantic figure to appeal to them. No doubt, a hundred years from now Elizabeth will be one of the most irresistible figures of the past to the poet and the romancer, for the legend that the members of this cult have set on foot will grow and strengthen daily. Their belief is that she was one of those rare beings who are too exalted for human contact, and that the development of her natural superiority was one of the most remarkable in the psychic history of mortals. Profoundly imbued, according to them, with the doctrine that a man should develop his personality at the expense of every duty, every affection, of kin or subject, she withdrew herself more and more, not only from the world, but from her husband and children, that she might devote her thoughts only to what was beautiful, live the inner life alone, and develop her personality in a manner possible to most people only after they have cast off the flesh; that her sensitiveness in time became so great that contact with common mortals was unbearable. That is the legend, and, mark my words, before a century has passed she will be painted with a halo about her head. It will be only the glamour of royalty, but the world will never suspect that.
“This is the truth of the matter—like all truth, to be found midway between two extremes of belief: Elizabeth was a simple creature, bright, sweet, lovely, but, although highly accomplished, moderately gifted in thematter of intellect and strength of character. Nature never intended her to mount a throne. She should have married for love a man who would have been faithful to her, and lived a life without the ostentation and public duties she hated, a life that would have been filled with all the refined pleasures. Instead of that the poor child was suddenly shot from her simple country home, where hardly a whisper of the world and its ways had reached her, up to the most formal and exacting throne in Europe. Here she was not only tormented by her mother-in-law, but by the rapidly waning love of her husband, to whom at that time she was much attached. She was too young and too undisciplined to accept her fate with philosophy; nor did she ever develop the strength of intellect and character which enables a disappointed woman to conquer life. Life conquered her, poor thing; as a queen and a woman she was a failure. First, while she was very young, she ran away and sulked for several years. She returned, but only to absent herself more and more from a life which she detested increasingly. It is quite true that she loved the beautiful things of this world—art, music, literature—above all, nature. In many ways she was an exquisite creature, and in these congenial resources she found much compensation for the constant unhappiness and the terrible tragedies of her life. Every person of refined tastes cares less and less for the world as he grows older. When the most excruciating disappointments crown this natural tendency, and there is not ambition to dominate experience, then most men and women of Elizabeth’s age live much the same sort of life that she did; and the world knows too little about them to call them either mad or psychic phenomena. So much for Elizabeth—and let no one grudge her success in legend as a compensation for the failure of her life.
“As to Ludvig—”
“A moment,” interrupted Fessenden, “what of Rudolf?”
“Rudolf had suffered frightfully from headaches for several months before he died, brought on by the dissipations into which he plunged to drown the miseries of his life. He was one of the most rarely gifted of the Hapsburgs, from the first Rudolf down; he had no responsibilities to occupy his brilliant and restless mind; he had a great weakness for women, and they pursued him; his domestic life was wretched; he sought oblivion in every possible way, and the autopsy proved that he had unhinged his brain. He undoubtedly killed himself in a wild moment of intolerableennuiand disgust. That Marie Vetsera was present adds little to the significance of his death. It might as well have been any other woman, and Rudolf was incapable of the pathos of a romantic suicide. As to his insanity, it was not congenital; and there was no sign of it before he gave himself up to his last dissipations.
“Ludvig was born with no other screw loose than an inordinate admiration of himself and the actor’s disposition to startle the world from the centre of the stage. All little kings—and some big ones—have a disproportionate idea of their own importance; and to realize the extreme point to which Ludvig, after his brain became clouded, carried this not unnatural delusion, you have only to visit his castle of Neu-Schwanstein and look at the throne room. It was not even built before Bavaria became a mere state of the German Empire, and yet it has the proportions and the splendor suitable for one of the three or four great monarchs of the earth. And this, not in his capital, but in one of his many castles! But Ludvig’s passion for beauty, his patronage of Wagner, and the splendid monuments he has raised in Bavariato his own artistic genius, make him quite worthy of the inevitable legend. If you will look at his photographs, even those taken after he became gross and had suffered from many attacks of insanity, you will see that his eyes were always the eyes of the idealist. It was to this very idealism that he owed his insanity. Above all others was the monastic ideal of chastity, but he did not have the self-denial to live on monastic fare; and he was a king, and there was everything in his life to give his brain and imagination a preternatural activity. The consequence was periodical attacks of insanity, and the accentuation of his original peculiarities; towards the end, no doubt, he was vicious enough. The same thing might happen to any American, although, of course, centuries of interbreeding render the brain more susceptible to abnormal conditions. So much for Ludvig von Bayern, who in his youth was beautiful enough to demand from the very canvas absolution for all his vanities. As for poor Otto—recall all you know of the Duc de Reichstadt—I mean the young man of history, not of fiction.”
Fessenden rose and thrust his hands into his pockets, staring at the ground. In a moment he raised his head and made the motion of flinging a load from his shoulders.
“Is that all that has worried you?” asked Alexandra curiously.
“Yes,” he said, “that is all.”