XXIX
Vienna, the stately brown city, so haughty without, so simple within. Vienna, the city of beautiful men and women, of fastidious breeding and dispersing forces. Vienna, the gay, the wanton, the merciless. Vienna, the city of the dead soul; the great actress whose still perfect shell moves mechanically upon the stage, not knowing under what sudden stroke she may tremble and disappear. In no city on earth is life so full of charm and yet of unreality, no city where one feels so alive and yet so encompassed by dreams, where to the American New York is not, but a superlative civilization with the taint of the Middle Ages in its brain.
Ranata felt something of this luscious yet corrupt flavor of her native city as she drove from the station to the Hofburg; but vaguely, for her contrasts were few.Moreover, her father had met her, and was talking constantly and somewhat at random. If Ranata had not been preoccupied she would have noticed the evident embarrassment in his manner and his elaborate attempt at dissimulation. He was more affectionate than was his wont; a shade less of his perfect breeding and he would have appeared apologetic. But his daughter’s brain was heavy and absorbed by one idea. Sarolta was driving to her own palace, and Ranata was anxious to take advantage of these few moments with her father. Suddenly he gave her the opportunity she wished. He remarked in the tone of one whose masculine recesses have received a welcome illumination:
“I suppose, my dear, that you have come to Vienna to have a personal conference with your dressmakers.”
“No,” said Ranata, and it was notable that she did not smile; “I have come to ask a great favor of your Majesty, and I beg that you will predispose yourself to grant it.”
The Emperor stiffened, the natural act of a monarch whose life is passed with those that crave the royal favor. But the act to-day was more than mechanical; there were several portentous favors this extraordinary daughter of his might have nerved herself to ask—might indeed have deluded herself she was in a position to ask—and the very thought of them turned him to steel.
“Well?” he demanded.
“It is a singular request, sir, for it is for permission to revive an ancient custom of our house. I wish to go down into the crypt alone on this midnight and pray by the coffin of Rudolf.”
The Emperor drew a long breath of relief. There was nothing remarkable to him in the request, for he believed his daughter to be as devout a Catholic as himself. “Howcould a Hapsburg be otherwise?” he would have asked, if questioned; and dismissed the subject. Nevertheless, he divined that her mind must be in heavy shadow to prompt an immediate act of devotion at some inconvenience, when any other time would have done as well. Scrutinizing her face, he saw the change in it, even through the disguise of a veil with heavy dots. Trained in detail, he remembered that he had never seen her wear such a veil before. His experienced brain travelled to the natural solution. There was truth in the story that she loved the American; and she wished to do penance among the tombs of her ancestors. That meant, of course, that the affair was closed, that when she had realized the enormity of her folly she had hastened to mortify her flesh and spirit in a worthy manner. He had not been surprised to hear that she loved at last, but he wondered at the security into which he had fallen during the preceding ten years, deluded, like others, by her superb indifference; and the evident marks of suffering he saw in her face to-day in nowise set his heart at odds with his purpose to marry her at once. Even were he not now convinced that she might at any moment become a menace to the Dual Monarchy, or had he been less harassed by those that feared and hated her, he still would have used his authority to marry her without delay. He knew the weaknesses of his blood, and was determined that her very obvious genius to make the world ring with a scandal should be clogged immediately. He resolved, however, to defer the subject until the morrow, snatching at the prospect that the midnight vigil would subdue and chasten her spirit. He answered as if he had given her request due consideration:
“There is no objection, if you are sure you have the strength to go through the ordeal—that you will not have an attack of hysteria. Of course”—in response toan indignant ejaculation—“I know you are not that sort of woman, but it will be a trying hour. Sarolta must accompany you to the church; she can wait for you in one of the chapels or in the carriage. And a friar will go down with you to hold the taper. I insist upon that.”
“Very well,” said Ranata listlessly. The friar would be an integral part of the scene, like enough to those who had gone down with her ancestors, dead and alive.
She sat through the early dinner with her father, but five o’clock was now her hour for tea, and she made a bare pretence to eat. She wondered if she would be hungry in the crypt, then scowled so severely at her levity that Count von Königsegg, who was watching her, feared that her suspicions had been roused by something in the dull flow of conversation. Several of the archdukes were present, besides the many members of the Emperor’s household, and they were mildly discussing a crisis in the Reichsrath. The minister had greeted her coldly. He was profoundly annoyed at the sensation she had made, and the consequent failure of their carefully laid plans. That she would play her cards in Hungary with the historic tact of the Hapsburgs he had made no doubt, and that she could fascinate and beguile he had had personal evidence; but that she had in her the elements of a public popularity, so desirable in a sovereign, and so reprehensible in anything less than the acknowledged heir to the throne, he had not for a moment suspected. These last weeks had left him aghast, for he was by no means desirous of the slightest disturbance in the present order of things, nor to be the victim of suspicion from those who might one day be in a position to elevate or ruin him. He had been prepared to declare for the Archduchess if she played her part properly, and her star shot up at precisely the right moment; but for the present he was puzzled how to act. His instinctwas to desert the sinking ship, but he found it difficult to connect Ranata with the idea of failure; she looked, pallid and extinguished as she was, cast for a great part—not endowed by Nature with the finest gifts of the Hapsburgs to languish in obscurity. He did not approve of marrying her. The Emperor’s course must be nearly run, and she would be a valuable card to hold when the anticipated calamities fell upon them. However, the man selected was of Hapsburg blood; no vow of renunciation would be required of her, and at the right moment she could be summoned forth. Perhaps it was as well; for what to do with her meanwhile, he confessed, was beyond any inspiration likely to visit his fertile brain. Perhaps she would be ill for a time; she looked so unlike her usual self as to invite the hope, and that at least would keep her quiet for some months.
Ranata, suspecting naught of these unsympathetic reflections, was longing for the night. When she was finally alone in her rooms—those rooms that looked like nothing outside the Hofburg except other musty old palaces where the sun never entered—she sat down in the dark and attempted to prepare her mind for the ghostly pilgrimage. Her sense of drama was stirred at the thought of performing this ancient rite, but she felt less religious than she had hoped, less ancestral, less akin to those quaking girls who had been swept down into the cold vault of the Capuchin by the stern arm of Maria Theresia. One had died of the small-pox, caught from the emanations of a recent victim—doubtless the poor little body had half-disintegrated with fright, and let the poison in. She wondered if she would be frightened, and dismissed the thought with an impatient shrug. Her strong soul had little acquaintance with fear. Still she would have welcomed a premonition of it at this moment, if it had brought on its long shadows the firstmutters of ancestral superstition—the first stirring of her stupefied Hapsburg sense. But her thought flew to Fessenden Abbott. She wrenched it from him, and it fluttered about among the pleasures and distractions of her months in Hungary. She found herself longing for the bright rooms in the palace of Buda, the bustling business-like streets of Pest. She recalled her first and only visit to a shop, and wished she might repeat the experience on the morrow; she had had many vivid accounts of the shops of Vienna from Alexandra, who, untrammelled by state, or even by the haughty usages of the aristocracy, visited the shops as often as she pleased.
“I feel hopelessly modern, frivolous,” she thought, as she rose and walked to the window. “But it is merely the perversity of the brain. Like a spoiled child, it must do precisely what is not expected of it. I thought I had disciplined it better.”
She held aside a corner of the lace curtain, and peered down into the court-yard, and at the battered walls opposite. There would have been no danger of detection had her room been light, for the rain was falling heavily. The court-yard was deserted; and the scene was intolerably dreary. A prison-yard could be no worse.
Suddenly she was seized with a wild unreasoning terror, an impulse to fly from the Hofburg to Budapest and her many friends. A premonition seemed to rise out of the dark and press close upon her. Her brain tossed up the reserve, the embarrassment of her father’s manner, the watchful speculative regard of Königsegg’s cold eyes, the sensation of insignificance that had vaguely assailed her as she arrived in Vienna—of stepping down from a pedestal to withdraw into a niche. Why had she left Hungary? There she would have been safe, for nothing short of violence could have removed her, and that they would not dare to use. She touched the electricbutton as soon as she could find it; and when the room was softly brilliant, she wondered at her nerves. Determined to reduce them to subjection before their midnight ordeal, she sat down with a novel Alexandra had given her at parting. This was not the preparation for nocturnal prayer she might have wished, but it could be no more mischievous than her own unruly thoughts. It proved to be absorbing—a brisk well-written tale of mediæval love and adventure, war and romantic incident, without psychology, or a reminder of modern life and character. It was not the literature of her habit, but for that reason perhaps held her the more closely, the tenor of her mind being altered, and life as she knew it best forgotten. When, at a quarter to twelve, one of her maids entered with a long fur garment, and the announcement that the Obersthofmeisterin awaited the pleasure of her Imperial Highness, she arose with reluctance, and, as the woman adjusted the cloak and hood, glanced at the finish. “If I had not been sure of that final rapture,” she informed herself apologetically, “I believe I could not have rid my mind of it in the church.”