XXVI
Fessenden and Ranata walked rapidly and in silence over the paths the mountain peasants had trodden that night. There had been neither wind nor snow for many days, and what had fallen was compact and not too smooth for impatient feet. For a time the path was straight, and, looking back, the irregular mass of the castle on its isolated rock was the one dark object in the white radiance of the Alpine world. Soon, however, a sharp turn about the foot of one of the peaks that rose straight from the brief level seemed to fling them abruptly into an eternity of ice-fields and endless chains of glittering crests so high above that their fierce teeth must surely bite new pictures into the moon that hung so close. Ranata’s arm was within his, but Fessenden’s mind reverted to his boyhood in the Adirondacks, when he had stolen forth to his balcony on winter moonlight nights to gaze upon the snowy lake and peaks, anddream of their kin in the far-off Alps. How tame that picture seemed to-night, dear as it was! That was a mild and pleasant wilderness compared with this upper firmament of ice and desolation, with its black forests below and on high its masses of rock and crag that looked as if arrested in brutal warfare with each other.
In the course of an hour the path came abruptly to an end on the shore of a small lake, from three sides of which the mountains rose like the straight and jealous sides of a mighty jewel casket guarding the diamond treasure of some old god of the hills. The lake, looking smaller perhaps from the great height of the perpendicular mountains surrounding it, was oval in shape, and its frozen surface glittered and sparkled under the moon poised directly above. No light of man had ever drawn such radiance from the diamond. The air was so still that the cold was hardly noticeable. The silence was intense, oppressive, now that their feet no longer met the snow crisply. Ranata put her hand nervously to her head.
“What are you thinking of?” she asked.
“Of my boyhood in the Adirondacks. To-night a thousand years seem to have disappeared since then. And many and wild as were my dreams of the future in those callow days when I had leisure for dreams, no flight penetrated to the future which held these last weeks, to the indescribable solitude of this night with you. In those days I fancied myself a poor boy who had begun life in the orthodox log-cabin and must end in the White House. But that I should love a daughter of the Cæsars and hold her in my arms among the eternal snows of the loneliest of the Alps never muttered in my most exalted moments. Life is a rum thing.”
Ranata laughed in spite of the chaotic emotions thathad driven her forth. “Which do you really love best, I wonder, the sublime or the ridiculous? Do you know what I had almost made up my mind to do when I came down to dinner?”
“To go to-morrow with me to Fiume?”
“To-night; as soon as the others were out of the way, and Zrinyi could have the horses harnessed. After I left you there was an hour in which I think I really was mad. Every fact of existence except the possibility of being alone with you on your yacht seemed to have been burned out of my mind. I would have sold Austria to William, I would have flung Hungary to Roumania—there was no crime I would not have committed to have been alone on this earth with you. And now we are alone, and the fever is gone. I look back upon the hours before those poor creatures came and shouted Rudolf’s name as upon some half-remembered interval of insanity. But it was appallingly real then, and if it came once it may come again. After our return to Budapest—and I shall start to-morrow—I shall never see you again.”
“I still think you are unwise not to take advantage of this opportunity. You will regret it; take my word for that.”
“Doubtless, when it is happily too late. I am ice now. I can only describe my sensation while those wild men were begging me for Rudolf by asking you to imagine yourself standing under that frozen cascade over there. It seemed to me that for the first time I realized the enormity of his crime. He could have been a great monarch, he could have preserved his country, he could have saved Europe from unimaginable horrors; and every gift, every duty, every ambition disappeared into the flaming abyss of his passions. Oh, if my father could only have died twenty years ago! That alonecould have saved Rudolf, for it was excess that killed him; the occasional indulgence would not have mattered. And these men, and thousands like them, would have obeyed his lightest call to save Austria from Europe, to save it from Hungary if need be. They would come at my call. They would laugh even at my father. And, Fessenden, above those wild heads, and bodies like mountain beasts, I saw for a moment the pale face of Rudolf, terrible with agony and remorse, with impotent resentment against the law of the grave, dumbly beseeching me to continue the work that the great invisible forces up there had sent him into the world to accomplish. It was then that my blood turned to ice. An hour before—and in other moments, perhaps—I had been capable of greater guilt than Rudolf’s; for after all I have had no such temptations, no such provocations as his. Where you have upheld me, women, from the time he was old enough, the very girls of the court, flung themselves beneath his feet, honored to be dishonored by the heir to the throne, even had he been less fascinating as a man. My father had made no secret of his own amours; there has been no more corrupt court in Europe; Rudolf saw no necessity for restraint, and he used none. If he had married happily all might have been well, for he was not vicious, and his nature was very affectionate. But when does royalty marry happily? Fortunate the prince who marries the cow. Then at least there is one incentive the less. Rudolf had no such fortune, and disappointment andennui, multiplying themselves, drove him to the arms of charming women who wished for nothing so much as to make him forget, and from them to the boon companions who adored him, but dared not remonstrate had they wished, when he drank till morning. But what excuse had I? Only that of apassion so great and so real that it should give me the strength of these mountains. Without it, after gaining my wishes in Hungary, I might have become bored, indifferent, cynical; I might even, as I felt youth passing, have indulged in amours that no one would dare to take me to account for. I might have gone to my coffin there in the Kaisergruft without an ideal in my soul, disillusioned, all my original nature in ruins, reviling life, glad to die. Now it seems to me that after the inevitable agony is over, I have it in me to become really great in character, sustained by an inner life and fed by a memory that will keep me young till my death. I thought of this long ago, when I met you first, but it passed from my mind. It was more like a dream then. I know it to be a reality now. I doubt if there can be any such actual happiness as what I shall find in the memories of you.”
Fessenden looked at her long and intently. If she was of many and variable moods, the moods were of an intensity and truth which submerged the other women in her while they lasted. And he always responded to her deeper moments so fully and so involuntarily that only his ever-alert brain saved him from compromising his future conduct. As in the profoundest solitude he had ever known, he looked through her eyes into her naked soul, he had a long moment of doubt. In that cold ideal of fulfilled duty, with her love apotheosized and spiritualized, might she not in truth be happier than he could make her? Her state, and the more commonplace cause of the deep chill of an Alpine midnight, had cooled his own blood, and muffled the passionate voices in his imagination. For a moment he too felt the white intoxication of the ideal of a lifetime of self-immolation on the passionless shores of duty, forecasted the serenity with which Nature rewards perpetualstriving after spiritual heights, and compensates for the voluntary resignation of the joy of love. He darted a glance upward and was visited by a brief illusion: he and Ranata stood alone on the highest peak that pierced the stars. Then like Life he compromised.
“I wish for nothing less than your full and unconditional surrender,” he said. “If, when you have had time to know yourself better than you do now, you tell me that your decision is unalterable, I will persist no further. I believe that you will send for me before long, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps I have been blinded by my love, and the hopes with which it has inspired my imagination. There may be, there are, of course, depths in your mind of which I have no conception. These may contain forces that will finally shut me out of your life. If you convince me that I should add to your unhappiness by persisting, or that I should do you a great wrong by making you mine in spite of yourself, then I promise you here solemnly to withdraw finally from your life; and to be as eternally faithful to you as I believe you will be to me.”
Vilma from her high window saw them return. She had watched for them, not from the motive which had made her neighbor walk restlessly between her window and her writing-table, but in tempestuous sympathy with a romance against which she pressed so close. Her own heart she believed to be a graveyard with one tomb, and she found a vicarious happiness in this atmosphere of passionate and uncommon love that she was graciously permitted to enter. She had seen how it was from the first, and had done what she could to divert the attentions and the suspicion of Piroska. Pumping had had no effect on the wary Zápolya, and Vilma, with all her subtlety, was still in doubt as to what the possibleenemy may have seen or suspected. She had followed Fessenden and Ranata on the night of the ball, and waited without the door leading to the private apartments until she heard him returning; that she might be able to assure Piroska she had been their companion and chaperon. But Piroska had given no sign that she had been occupied during that brilliant night except with her many partners, and Vilma dared not tell Ranata what she had done. Gracious and captivating as the Princess was in her new rôle, it would have been a braver than Vilma who would have taken a liberty with her. Fessenden possessed no great charm for this young Hungarian, who preferred a more romantic type, but if he had inspired love in her beautiful princess she wished with all her heart that he too were of the blood of kings. Had these two been content with intrigue she would willingly have helped and shielded them, but she shrewdly suspected the truth. Astounding as the fact might be, the American wished to marry the daughter of an emperor and king. It took the ancient pattern of her brain a long while to adjust itself to the bare idea, but when time had accustomed her to its audacity she could, starved soul that she was, but sympathize. She too had had an intuition of Ranata’s state of mind when she bloomed upon them at dinner that night, breathing passion and defiance, and she heartily wished the Princess had slipped out of the castle with her lover instead of giving her word to the Obersthofmeisterin to return.
She had also overheard the words of Piroska to the American, and she had noted that the moment the Princess left the castle the sister lady-in-waiting had pleaded the morning toothache and gone to her room. It adjoined Vilma’s, and for two hours the friend had listened to the steady scratching of the enemy’s pen, interrupted only by hasty visits to the window. Vilmahad lived close enough to Piroska during these months of court life to be sure she did not keep a diary. She was now fully convinced that she was the tool of Königsegg for two reasons: it was worth her while, and she had intended to marry the American when he became convinced of the hopelessness of his suit. Piroska’s wiles had been patent enough if her hostility had not, and to-night, as the American had turned to her with an air of conclusion and six words which might have extinguished hope in a more sanguine heart, the hard little face of Piroska had settled into lines of malice and determination. She had been as gay as usual during the dinner, but the color had come back neither to cheek nor lips, and Vilma suspected that if the unfortunate lovers had flown that night Piroska would have managed to follow them as far as the first telegraph station. Now, no doubt, she was writing her long-deferred report.
As Vilma watched Ranata and Fessenden return, she slipped from the window-seat and climbed onto the bed, still huddled in her furs. The fire was out and the room almost cold, but she could not prepare for sleep knowing of the plot thickening in the next room. The hour had come to act, but what should she do? To attempt to intercept Piroska’s letter on the morrow would be futile; Piroska would see to that. Vilma did her justice; there would be no loose ends, as in novels, for the good fairy to unravel. Should she walk boldly in and hurl suspicion in her face? Vilma was too European to approve of the crude method. The wild idea occurred to her of smothering Piroska with a pillow as she slept, but she had a certain measure of common-sense; a tragedy in the royal household would put an end to court life in Buda for the present, perhaps thwart ambitions she half suspected, possibly send herself to keep company withPiroska. She dismissed with some reluctance the idea she was quite capable of executing, and suddenly determined to go into Piroska’s room and be guided by events. She left the bed and knocked on the connecting door; then, assuming that she had been answered, opened it and entered.
“I cannot sleep,” she said, “and I heard you moving about, so I thought you might be as glad of company as I. You are writing? How can you in this cold? Do you know I sat up to watch them come home? Not that I doubted they would, but I felt as if I were living in a chapter of romantic memoirs. I may write mine some day—but you should do that—you are so much cleverer than I.”
Piroska had risen politely and pushed a chair slightly away from her table. She had a small pile of manuscript before her, which she had the presence of mind not to attempt to conceal. “Iamcold,” she said, stifling a yawn, “and tired. But I could not go to bed. The excitement of the evening made me hopelessly wide awake, so I thought I would write my long-neglected letters.”
“It has been exciting—those wild simple creatures! But that looks like a book. Tell me—” her eyes were bright with girlish curiosity, “areyou writing a novel? You could! Ah! I know you are!”
“Well,” said Piroska, with a delicate hesitation, “I—for Heaven’s sake don’t breathe it, Vilma! One is such a fool until one succeeds!”
Vilma gave an ecstatic cry, and with a movement as swift and unexpected as that of a panther flung herself upon the mass of papers. “Let me see! Let me see!” she cried. But they were torn from her hands and the eyes that met hers blazed with the ferocity of a less civilized century.
“You dare!” gasped Piroska—“you dare!”
Vilma had seen enough. “Oh, very well,” she said haughtily. “I had no idea a book was like a tiger’s cub. It made me quite wild with curiosity, and I am sorry we tore the manuscript. Good-night. I would not sit up and copy it if I were you. Your tooth will be quite frightful to-morrow.”
She swept out, and locked the door as she closed it. Piroska, too, might be capable of using a pillow. She took down a candlestick and let herself noiselessly into the hall. It was very dark, except for the patches of ghostly moonlight; but commonplace fears were unknown to this girl of fighting ancestors, of women who had suffered worse than death. She knew that the men’s rooms were in the opposite wing, and she traversed the long corridors between without adventure or qualm. When she reached the wing she saw light under two doors; Zrinyi had undoubtedly sat up to await the return of the Princess. Which was the American’s door she had no means of knowing, but she did not hesitate. If her knock summoned Zrinyi she would tell him that she had a message for his guest which must be delivered then. It brought Fessenden, however, and she stepped quickly into his room and closed the door.
He did not look as astonished as she had expected, but she told her story breathlessly and begged him to act at once.
“It will do no good to intercept the report,” she added. “Even if you could, she would merely write another. But let me go to the Princess and beg her to fly with you to-morrow early. We could shut Piroska up for twenty-four hours. If you do not take this opportunity you will never have another. Her Royal Highness must have many enemies at court. This will be the final straw. Ifshe is forced to return to Vienna you will never see her again.”
“I wish that report to go to Vienna to-morrow,” said Fessenden, “and if you are not too tired to sit down for a few moments, I will tell you how you can help when she is once more in the Hofburg.”