XXX
Sarolta had sunk on a hot-water cushion in one of the chapels of the Capuchin Church, after an involuntary appeal to her archduchess to pray no longer than she could help. The friar, a dark blur in his brown robes, unlocked the door that opens on the winding stair sacred to the House of Hapsburg. As Ranata carried a lighted taper in her own hand, she motioned to him to walk behind her, and picked her way on the uneven stones worn by four centuries of men and women who had gone down with the dead, or to pray among the ruins of thosewho had ruled and loved and oppressed, or battled in secret and impotence with the wretched comedy of their existence. Twice before—since her early girlhood, when her tutor in history had included an occasional visit to the Hapsburg dust in his course—had Ranata descended this stair: behind the coffin of Rudolf, and the coffin of her mother. The first time she had been blind and dumb with grief; the second, horror-stricken as she still was, she had meditated sadly upon the conquest of life over the charming and singular woman she had known so little. To-night, as she reached the foot of the stair, and held the taper aloft, she was conscious of little but the cold and the dank smell of death, which in spite of glass and lead and bronze, and robbed of its final offensiveness, pervades the crypt. It is an odor hardly definable; it might be the very breath of Death himself rising thickly through earth and mould.
Ranata shuddered and drew her cloak about her, but walked resolutely down between the long rows of sarcophagi, elaborate and ostentatiously simple, crowding close behind the bars. She was thankful that her father had insisted upon the escort of the friar; but when she came to the great gates behind which Maria Theresia still reigns in the pomp of death over those that have followed her, and her silent attendant had turned the key, she motioned to him to remain without.
She stood for a moment looking with a curious impersonality, of which she could not divest herself, at the magnificent leaden sarcophagus, on its pedestal, of one of the few great rulers of Austria. The carving and chasing, the bas-reliefs and fixtures, were so elaborate and beautiful that she caught herself wondering how many years the august remains had awaited their final state, or if the far-sighted Empress had set the craftsmen to work long before her death. She was a practicalsoul, and it was likely. At her feet, in the plainest of leaden coffins, lay the husband she had loved and snubbed. About her, in receptacles of varying art and costliness, were nine of her sixteen children.
Ranata turned her back upon the last vanity of the ancestor who had been a religion of her youth, and passing the equally lofty but far less imposing sarcophagus of Franz II., with the perfunctory receptacles of his four wives scattered near, she paused for a moment beside the long coffins of Napoleon’s second wife, and of him who had been called King of Rome and Duke of Reichstadt—he whom the French remembered as the second Napoleon when his cousin seized the throne. She stared down at the lead above the dust of the little cousin for whom she had much sympathy and compassion, knowing him to have been the victim of court intrigues, his soul and body systematically ruined. She wondered how much rebellion had beaten beneath that apparent docility, how much cunning, perhaps; biding his time in his grandfather’s old age, hating and fearing Metternich, yet neither wise enough nor strong enough to avoid the traps that never cut his feet, and closed about him as softly and warmly as sirens and drugs. She wondered if the French poet had divined the secretive nature correctly, or if a true Hapsburg brain had dissolved in the silences of the crypt; then, if the ruined soul had been graciously relit in consideration of its youth and ignorance; if, in some juster world, the fine brain he may have inherited might not now in its maturity be fulfilling the purpose for which it had sprung from a force that would still seem to haunt the earth.
These were not the thoughts, the sulking superstitions, she had come to evoke, and she passed on. The alcove containing what was left of her mother and brother, with the angel between them presented by the ladies ofHungary, was before her, but she wished before kneeling and praying there to saturate herself with this subtle atmosphere of ancient death, of indestructible repose, of serene and final disassociation from the world above. This portion of the crypt is only two-thirds below ground. A high small window admits a patch of light by day; but the glass is heavy, and no sound penetrates. The Hapsburgs sleep as quietly as the Pharaohs.
Ranata wandered past the brilliant silver-like coffin of Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, but she did not linger; she had little sympathy with the unknown uncle whose wavering brain had cost him throne and life. “If I had had Mexico,” she thought arrogantly, “I should have kept it. Picturesque an object as he was with his American empire, and his brave death, he will never be a favorite in history or romance, for human nature despises the waverer. What the Americans call bluff is not only the wiser policy, but makes a stronger appeal to the imagination.” She walked down between the long rows of the lesser dead, pausing a moment at the simple coffin of that cousin who had set her thin frock on fire with a lighted cigarette, hastily concealed as her father approached. She smiled with tender pity, grateful that her own parent, obdurate in many things, was advanced in a few simple particulars.
Finally she returned to the elevated remains of the old Emperor Franz, and holding her taper high, looked slowly about her. It was a sufficiently grewsome sight, those piles and rows of gray sarcophagi, most of them but stark shadows under the meagre light she carried, and the ray of a lamp that filtered through the little window. She gave an involuntary shudder of feminine horror, and once more experienced a throb of gratitude for the proximity of the friar, standing beyond the door. He had extinguished his taper and looked like a statue at prayer.Her eye rested again on the coffin of the Duc de Reichstadt. “Poor Franz!” she thought. “What barbarians they were only two-thirds of a century ago! I wonder how much better we are now—they! I feel, rather, as if my spirit had been purged down here, than packed with its old ghosts.”
She let her taper trail on the stones. Her pilgrimage was a failure. The night and its horrid suggestions had accomplished no degeneration for her; she might as well have come by day, or spared at any time her limbs the cold, her nostrils this infliction. And there she faced and accepted the truth. What she had been was gone, what she was so must she remain. Her brain in its absolute modernity must help her to endure and to regulate her life; from her ancestors she would receive no further help, neither now nor ever. From all miasmatic obsessions rising out of the crypt in her soul she was free henceforth; the crypt itself had vanished into that eternity so far from the corruption about her. She lifted her head suddenly with a sensation of liberty, of independence, which even Hungary and her intimate spiritual absorption of her American lover had not given her. Then she went forward and knelt at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin. She had rejected dogmas and theologies, but she still could pray; for she had perfect faith in an overruling power, who, if great enough to manage the universe, must be great enough to answer prayer without upsetting the balance of His machinery. And prostrate at the foot of the ugly bronze coffin under half its height of brittle wreaths, that held the clay of the warmest nature she had ever known, of the only being she had deeply loved until now, of the Hapsburg whose light might have raised him so high in history and had gone out in folly and dishonor, she had her moment of profound tribute to the dead, of utter abnegation of self.When she rose from her knees she entered the recess, and pushing aside the old wreaths with their emblazoned streamers, the gifts of kings, and princes, of family, and illustrious subjects, she pressed her wet face for a moment to the head of the coffin, then walked rapidly from the inner crypt, down the lane between the older dead, and up the stair.
Sarolta was not in her chapel, and, dismissing the friar, Ranata left the church. The Obersthofmeisterin was in a corner of the carriage sound asleep. The coachman slept profoundly on the box. The footman had disappeared. Ranata stood alone in the streets of Vienna. The clock struck one. She, a daughter of the Hapsburgs, was as free as any waif in the city. The sensation of liberty which had taken possession of her down in the crypt surged wildly to her head. She walked swiftly to the corner and stood there, pushing back her hood and staring about her. The rain had ceased, but the night was black. What was there to prevent her from finding a cab, driving to the station, and taking the first train for Berlin? If Fessenden were not already there a telegram would summon him in haste. From Berlin it was but a few hours to Bremen. She took another step forward, then almost laughed aloud. Was this the first result of her rendezvous with the dead? But if that had been futile, her brain and her sense of duty were still in control. She had renounced love once for all. Moreover, her flight would mean the exile and disgrace in her old age of Sarolta. To-morrow she would return to Hungary and take up her work there. Now that she knew exactly on what forces she must rely, she could hope to walk her self-appointed path without faltering; and in gratitude for her strength, and for a memory which the inflexible laws of her station could never take from her.
Nevertheless, she lingered for a time, walking aimlessly to and fro, for it was the most complete liberty she had ever known, and she enjoyed it much as a child enjoys itself the first time it runs away. It also appealed to her sense of humor, and she would have been amused still more could she have come face to face with her father.
And so she rejected her second opportunity for flight and actual liberty, awakened the terrified coachman, and returned to the Hofburg.