XXVII
Two nights after her return Ranata went to the opera-house of Budapest for the last time. Much to her chagrin she was ten minutes late. Royalty has its privileges and virtues. It may exercise the courtesy of promptness without loss of prestige, and no men and women the world over sit in an opera-box with the same ease and dignity and grace. From childhood they are trained to stand and sit without moving or betraying fatigue, and if the frequent necessity adds to the sum of their mortal expiations, it makes them as decorative, when properly dressed, as their ancient palaces and historical pageants.
But for one princess the tenor of the day had been disturbed. A sleepless night had resulted in an involuntary nap at three o’clock in the afternoon. Her drive had been late, and she had returned home so short a time before the early dinner that her maids had detained her through half of it. She regretted having announced her intention to attend the opera, but it was apremière, and she would have been expected in any case.
The large house was crowded with the gay aristocracy of Budapest, and with many who, if not so highly placed, could dress as well, and contribute to the general effect of brilliant beauty: an effect which owed more than the women would have admitted to the varied andmagnificent uniforms of the officers. Orders glittered on black coats as on colored, and every woman wore her abundant store of jewels. But fans and heads were moving restlessly. Where was their princess? It was thepremièrein Hungary of Massenet’s “Le Jongleur de Notre Dame,” and this music-loving people were eager for the curtain to rise.
At ten minutes past seven that mysterious electric current that announces the coming of royalty to the sensitive faculties of Europeans flew over the house; bringing it to its feet, and lifting its eyes to the gala box facing the stage, as if manipulated by a spring.
Ranata, accompanied by Sarolta and Alexandra, her Grand Chamberlain, Prince Illehazy, and Count Zrinyi, entered and advanced to the front of the box, acknowledging the waving of handkerchiefs and clapping of hands, the well-bred “Élyens” and “Vivats” and “Hochs.” She wore white velvet, a small crown of pearls, and many pearls on her neck. For the first time she showed the wear of too much thought and loss of sleep; she was pale rather than white, and her eyes were listless. During the few moments that she stood there, however, while the band played the national anthem, her guests on either side of her, the admiring house saw only the perfect carriage of her form and head, the undimmed brilliancy of her hair, and that most rare combination of beauty and majesty.
The anthem finished, the royal party took their seats, the opera began. Ranata kept her eyes resolutely bent upon the stage, but although she felt and had been severely drilled in music, hers was the imagination which escapes control under the influence of the only art that penetrates to the key-notes of being. The spell of the limpid semi-religious music swirled round her like a soft tide. She saw far beyond the poor juggler apologizingto the Virgin for desecrating her name that he might gratify a heartless rabble and keep his wretched body from starving; and if she forbade her eyes to wander over the house, every nerve told her that Fessenden Abbott was not there.
She had asked him to leave Hungary immediately upon his return to Budapest, and she knew that if he had not done so—he must await important telegrams—he would not come to the palace, nor to any gathering where she was sure to be. And to attend the opera except in her train would have excited the comment both wished to avoid.
Whether he had gone or not she did not know, for she would not ask Alexandra; if indeed her friend knew, for the brother and sister had said good-bye at the station in Budapest. Ranata, who had been gifted with no greater measure of consistency than the rest of her sex, had hoped to see him while driving, while entering the opera-house, to receive from him some swift involuntary token that he was thinking of her as persistently as she was of him.
For she thought of little else, and she was aghast at the power of love to defy the will. The emotional struggle had induced a physical lassitude she had never known before. That morning she had risen with the thought, “Am I going to send for him to-day? Am I?Am I?” And the question had risen again and again, acquainting her for the first time with the insolent defiance of the fixed idea to the higher qualities of the brain. She had had experience of the dual entity in the mental household before, but never so complete a sense of division, nor of possession by faculties which seemed to have forced an entrance into her mind rather than have risen from its depths.
She had not sent for him, however, and she hardlyknew whether she had refrained through the exercise of a will which appeared to sit in a corner smiling with amusement, from pride, a sense of futility, or merely because the argument in her mind had not finished in time. In any case she felt so far from her imperious self that she was almost as alarmed as she was unhappy. She was filled with a dull abhorrence of the idea of living the rest of her life on the surface of her nature, as she was attempting to live it to-night. For what else was left her? Did she become queen, and none knew better than she that it was but a possibility among a thousand opposing forces, she could occupy her brain with routine as her father did; but in a constitutional monarchy, particularly in one as jealous of its rights as Hungary, she would exercise so little power that, with her merciless clarity of vision, she must soon know herself for what she was, an ornamental figure-head. It would be the pride of the Hungarians to have the most beautiful queen in Europe, delight the abundant enthusiasm and the loyal instinct of their natures to love their elected sovereign; and they would value her the more for a charm which must unite all factions and preserve them from internal conflict. They would vote her immense sums to live as a queen should, to restore to the old palace of Buda its ancient glories and excite the envy of Europe. All these things she might have, and she knew them to be toys.
Did she sympathize with the tide of liberty rising in the world, and nowhere so vigorously as in Hungary? She had put the question from her again and again, and it had returned as often. Surely he had not revolutionized her brain to that extent; she must be less than herself were she unfaithful to the monarchical idea. And yet, when her mind left Fessenden Abbott it seemed to her that some mysterious force drew it to the greatsullen heart of mankind, brooding eternally on its birthright of freedom; every instinct of independence, when not crushed by the tyranny of the Turk or the Russian, still blunted and pruned in a thousand petty and humiliating ways. Would the socialists conquer William? And then—when with greater liberty had come their own adaptation to the unalterable facts of life and human nature—would the world be better, a more habitable place for mankind in the general? And was that the destiny of the human race—the happiness of the many, not the exaltation of the few? That it was a great thought, a grand theory, she did not pretend to deny. But did she sympathize with it?
While she assured herself contemptuously that she did not, that the order of the centuries must be best merely because it was, a part of her brain seemed to her to accept the doctrine, and give itself no concern to argue. She turned her back upon it. Why argue, indeed? A month, a few months hence, possibly a year, the influence that now possessed her would be so far removed that her mind would have recovered its balance, alien thoughts must have sunk so deep that she would only unearth them now and again as curiosities. She made up her mind that if Alexandra did not marry Zrinyi she would put an end to the intimacy with herself; and it seemed to her, in her present unhappy condition, that she would be insensible to further sorrow. She should indeed welcome complete loneliness, barren of outward suggestion. There could be no doubt of the triumph, in time, of her strong will, of her absolute fidelity, in thought as in deed, to the lofty station to which she had been born.
She sighed for her lost superstitions, rather for the superstitions of her fathers which might have been here had no alien influence entered her life. How they mustsustain the soul of majesty through its trials, through its loneliness, through the long martyrdom of its earthly course. There had been times when she had heard the deep mutter of those ancient ghosts, when for a brief hour they had risen and possessed her brain. Indeed, there had been hours—usually when Alexandra’s uncompromising practicality summered in its native land—when it had seemed to her that in the depths of her soul was a charnel-house of hideous memories, ambiguous of outline, of old corruptions, unknown in her life but transmitted with her blood, of impulses for tyranny and cruelty, and unbridled passions, of lust of blood, and callous indifference to human suffering. Philip the Second and Joan the Mad were but two of her illustrious ancestors who might have sent filtering down the worst traits and impulses which the human heart is capable of supporting. There had been times when she had believed that had she been born a century earlier it would have needed but the circumstances to make her the vilest of women. She could have reigned with her feet in blood and loved as royal harlots have loved since Messalina burned her pitch in history. And, she recalled, as she listened to the soft passionless music of the opera, there had also been moments when she had regretted that no such life could be hers—wondered if indeed it had not been.
But it was years now since the last of these obsessions had risen, five or six, at least. She had acquired great control over herself; moreover, they had rested impotent under healthy influences; and assuredly in the company of Fessenden Abbott she could not have evoked their memory, the ghosts of those old ghosts. Would it not perhaps be better if she could? Would not even the occasional demoralization of her spiritual nature be a lesser sin than this treachery to the divinity in her royalblood? Were she steeped in superstition she might have known her lover better than she had; but the temptation to marry him, the persistent disposition to look at life from his point of view, would never have assailed her for a moment.
Her eyes during this long reverie, interrupted only by anentr’acte, were fixed upon the stage. The surface of her brain had taken its impression of the interior of the monastery where the starving mountebank, cursed by the prior for his blasphemy, had been enticed that he might find absolution in the life of a monk and fill his stomach daily. The priests and friars in their rich white cassocks, the brown interior of the monastic room, made a harmonious and insidious picture, and the despair of the miserable youth while the other cenobites boasted of the arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, music—with which they glorified the Virgin, drew tears from many sympathetic eyes.
The juggler and a kindly friar were alone, and the elect was pouring into the astonished ear of the poor ignoramus the story of the birth of Christ in a manger, and explaining that the Lady of Sorrows understood not only Latin, but all languages, and even dialects, and had as merciful an ear for the outcast as for the king. The mountebank, with his primitive credulity, his almost maniacal terror under the curse of the abbot, is a vivid study of superstition in the Middle Ages. As Ranata’s attention was captured for the moment by the intensity of the final moments of the act, she found herself envying the simplicity of a creature as capable, in his primal limitations, of the extremest satisfaction and happiness as of terror and despair. The secondentr’acteis very short. A few moments after the curtain rises the impressive double row of friars in their sumptuous cassocks march out of the chapel to their own solemn music,and the mountebank enters alone, throws off his monastic robe, and in his costume of a harlequin offers his juggler’s art to the glorification of the painted Virgin above the altar. It is a scene almost incredible in its childish superstition, but so pathetic that in that rapt audience neither Jew nor Protestant paid his brain the tribute of a smile. Ranata, of all persons, saw no humor in it, for her mind traversed the history of her race, and halted suddenly at the memory of Maria Theresia, who had sent her daughters down alone into the imperial crypt on the eve of their marriage to pray among the coffins of their ancestors. She recalled how she herself had sometimes felt an impulse to go down there in the night and do likewise, that she might satisfy that something in the depths of her soul so akin to those who had dwelt in the benighted past.
Her attitude suddenly lost its graceful ease. She stiffened and sat erect as if about to spring; but the eye of the house was focussed on the stage and she was forgotten. Was not the time come for that nocturnal pilgrimage? Might not she there, among those four centuries of her dead, steep herself in that subtle aura of personality which still must diffuse itself through lead and bronze? Alone there, at midnight, with but the light of a taper to illumine those motley hillocks, with the dank odor of death clogging her senses, kneeling close to the dust and the corruption which had lived so intensely with the blood that ran in her own veins, must she not recapture her inherited superstitions, break with the present, absorb once more the poison of the past? She realized that it was not to satisfy her sense of kinship with the dead that she should now go to them alone at midnight, but to revive the lost sense of indissoluble relationship, of similarities, of the closest likeness of which inherited blood and brain-cells are capable. Sheshould kneel finally at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin, and pray there until she was a Hapsburg once more.
Heavy and abnormal as her brain was from fatigue, sleeplessness, passionate misery of thought, and reaction from the exalted mood of her last interview with Fessenden, still it seemed to her that it drew away in modern disgust from the idea that had risen precipitately in its middle and taken possession. But Ranata clung to that idea as to her one hope of salvation; and as the Virgin and the angels, which had appeared in place of the picture above the altar, to reveal the eternal beauty of simple faith to the indignant priests, were growing more luminous, and at the same time, so perfect the art, less and less material, and the poor juggler’s spirit was struggling from its flesh, she matured the details of her plan; and half an hour later, when she descended from the carriage in the palace court-yard, she asked Sarolta to be ready to accompany her to Vienna on the following day.