CHAPTER XX
The Crown Prince Rudolph—His quarrel with the German Emperor—His affability and his hauteur—A spoiled child—His search for a wife—Marriage to Princess Stéphanie—Disappointment and disillusion—Stéphanie’s book—“A long, long, terrible night has gone by for me”—Mary Vetsera and her family—How Mary Vetsera was taken first to the Hofburg and thence to Meyerling.
The name Rudolph had not been borne by a Habsburg ruler for five hundred years. A curious fatality seemed to attach to it, and probably had inspired a superstitious fear of it. Rudolph II. had died mad. Rudolph III. and Rudolph IV. had died young—the one at twenty-seven and the other at twenty-six. But people had ceased, as it seemed with good reason, to think of such ominous things; and the Crown Prince Rudolph inspired great hopes as well as great affection.
That he was really a degenerate, touched by the hereditary taint, is hardly, indeed, to be doubted; but the symptoms of degeneracy were not conspicuous, and, on the whole, passed unobserved. He must be classed with the brilliant Habsburgs, or, at least, among those who had literary and artistic tastes, which they cultivated, and were proud of. He travelled, and wrote a book about his travels; he edited a monumental work on the scenic beauties of the Austrian Empire; he consorted, on very affable terms, with artists and men of letters. He was also one of the friends of the late King Edward, who remarked of him that he was a good German—“at all events in the sense of being anti-Prussian”; and he showed character in a passage-at-arms with the German Emperor, who spoke contemptuously of his preoccupation with the fine arts:
“Nonsense of that sort,” the Emperor is reported to have said, “is unworthy of a soldier and a Crown Prince.”
“There is only one thing,” Rudolph is reported to have replied, “which is unworthy of a Crown Prince, and that is to aspire to the throne during his father’s life-time.”
And yet, when Countess Marie Larisch came to tell what she knew of the Meyerling tragedy, her “secret” was to the effect that Rudolph himself had not only aspired to, but also conspired for, the throne of Hungary during Francis Joseph’s life-time. But neither story can be said to disprove the other; for one can discover no grounds for crediting Rudolph with firm and consistent principles.
He was capable of affability; but he was also capable of hauteur. One might compare him, as one might compare a good many of the Habsburgs, to a poker which will unbend itself, but declines to be unbent by others. Some workmen employed in the Palace discovered that, when he came among them, as a child, and talked to them while they were engaged in decorations and repairs. “Well, what is your name, young fellow?” they presumed to ask him; and the little boy drew himself up. “Papa and mamma call me Rudolph,” he answered. “Other people call me Monseigneur.” He was young enough for the snub to amuse without giving pain. Most likely the workmen declared him to be whatever is the German for “a chip off the old block.” At any rate he grew up to be popular with people who did not know him, or only knew him slightly. He was “unser Rudi,” just as the German Emperor Frederick was “unser Fritz.”
Still, he was a spoiled child, and precociously cynical; and perhaps, in view of the way in which he was brought up, it would have been hard for him to be anything else. The legend of his mother’s devotion to him is found at the circumference of his circle, but cannot be traced to its centre. From an early age, he saw and understood too much for innocence. Among other things he saw the “go-between,” and knew for what purpose she went between. There was no example before his eyes to lead him to look upon happiness in marriage as an easily attainable ideal; and he held women cheap, because so many of them made themselves cheap with him. One of Countess Marie’s stories is to the effect that she boxed his ears for laughing at “love-sick girls,” and boasting of his conquests, and saying of a certain Elizabeth T——: “The silly goose thinks I adore her, and so I can do anything I like with her.”
It was, therefore, as a young man who had already lost his illusions that Rudolph set out in search of a wife. The story has been told that another lady travelled with him as a provisional companion while he was looking for a wife, and was, at least once, caught in his company in compromising circumstances by his prospective mother-in-law. He was too eligible a parti for any prospective mother-in-law to attach more importance than she could help to such a contretemps; and after Rudolph had rejected the suit of Princess Mathilde of Saxony, on the ground that her style of beauty was of too luxuriant an effulgence, then, “weary,” to quote Countess Marie, “of a choice of many evils, he decided to take the least of them, as represented by the Princess Stéphanie of Belgium.” And Stéphanie said, or is said to have said, “He asked me for my hand so prettily that I could not possibly refuse it to him.”
THE CROWN PRINCE RUDOLPH.
That in spite of the compromising discovery of the provisional lady companion in his rooms. His manner must indeed have been charming if it removed the impression of that surprise; but Rudolph could be fascinating when he chose, and his ready wit may have prompted a plausible explanation. Moreover, Stéphanie was little more than a child—too young to understand; and her father, Leopold II., was not a man into whose calculations either sentiment or morality entered. We all know him as the King who neglected the Austrian Archduchess to whom he was married for such persons as Cléo de Mérode and the Baroness Vaughan; and he may well have said to himself that he saw no reason why his daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than his wife, or why his younger daughter should expect to be any happier in her marriage than her elder sister.
It is notorious, at any rate, that no love was ever lost between Leopold and either of his daughters. The marriages of both of them were failures; and anyone who has ever lived in Brussels knows how many stories are current there as to his callous indifference to their matrimonial calamities. Again and again the story ran round Brussels that Princess Louise of Saxe-Coburg had run away from her husband and taken refuge at Laeken, and that her eyes were not only red but black: that Philip of Saxe-Coburg, in fact, had been knocking her about, and that she had vowed, with tears streaming down her cheeks, that nothing would induce her to return to him. But Leopold always sent her back; for why—one pictures him asking—should his daughter Louise expect to be any happier than his wife Henrietta, and why should his son-in-law be expected to behave any better than he himself behaved? No doubt there was logic of a kind—though not of the best kind—in the argument. No doubt, too, the same logic was brought into play when Stéphanie’s marriage was arranged.
Countess Marie protests that Stéphanie was plain, and had no style. She speaks of her red arms, her deplorable figure, her unbecomingly dressed hair; but that is not the verdict of contemporary Brussels, where she was to be seen daily in the Park and the streets. What Brussels remembers is a little girl—a “flapper,” as people say nowadays—simple and exceedingly attractive: a little girl who reminded Brussels of a Dresden china statuette; a little girl in short frocks, with her hair hanging down her back. She was not grown up, Brussels declares, when she was married; she was only dressed to look as if she were grown up. She was put into long skirts, and her hair was done up, du jour au lendemain, before the proper time, because this chance of a brilliant marriage had suddenly come her way.
Presumably there was something of the gawkiness of the schoolgirl about her when she was thus first dressed as a woman. Presumably that gawkiness did not entirely vanish in the course of the journey from Brussels to Vienna, where she was certain, as a foreigner, to encounter far more captious criticism; Vienna being nearly as chic as Paris, quite as quizzical in a heavier way, and decidedly less disposed to make smooth the path of the stranger. Stéphanie, in short, must at first have seemed a little “provincial” to the Viennese; and there were plenty of Viennese ladies—Palast Damen and others—whose cue it was to make the worst of her, and to rejoice that, as Rudolph had married such a wife, “there was no possibility,” to quote Countess Marie, “of his ever becoming a model husband.”
Assuredly he did not become one, and there does not even seem to have been an interlude of sunshine before the gathering of the clouds. Even the daughter presently born to the Archduke and the Archduchess is said to have been a cause of contention between them; and Stéphanie, with that passion for self-expression which she shared with almost every member of the House of Habsburg except Francis Joseph, has written out and published a confession of the emotions which her experiences of marriage brought her, and the lessons which she drew from them. This is the essential passage:—
“Two quite young persons see each other for the first time, know each other a quarter of an hour, and speak the binding word which death alone can untie.
“If there is something beautiful in the thought that two human beings who love and respect one another are joined before God in holy matrimony, so there is something uncommonly repulsive in the idea that such a union can be formed without any preparation and remain a lie from the altar to the grave.
“I regret I was not born in humble circumstances in some fisherman’s hamlet on the seashore. There one is nearer to happiness and peace than in our high positions and in our complex society. Happiness depends on living naturally, and what increases our distance from nature decreases our happiness.
“Is it possible? A long, long, terrible night has gone by for me, and I see a rosy dawn of hope on the clouded sky, a ray of light which tells of the rising sun of joy. Will the sun rise in full glory? Will he warm me with his rays, and dry the tears from my cheeks? Come, my sun, come! You find a poor faded flower whose freshness has been destroyed by the hard frost of fate.”
So Stéphanie wrote, after the tragedy had set her free, and at the hour when she was about to make use of her freedom and seek in a marriage of her own choice the happiness of which she had not enjoyed even the illusory semblance in the marriage into which she was hurried “without any preparation”—suddenly transformed from a schoolgirl into a grown woman—by a father to whom no sacrifice was too precious to be offered up on the altar of the Mammon of Unrighteousness. She was too young and innocent—too bourgeoise, perhaps—to enter into the spirit of the sacrifice. It was idle for anyone to tell her that Crown Princes would be Crown Princes, and that Crown Princesses who raised jealous objections to their doing so only made themselves ridiculous; that her splendid position was the substance, and love only the shadow. Taught by instinct, she knew better. She was too simple to wear a mask—or, if she did sometimes wear one, it was continually falling off; and she was too proud to pretend not to see the things which were happening under her nose. Moreover, just as there were women whose cue it was to make her feel provincial, so there were women—in many cases the same women—whose cue it was to make her feel neglected.
The list of the women for whom Rudolph neglected Stéphanie would be long and difficult to make out; but Mary Vetsera is the only one who matters. All the world knows—and knew at the time—that Mary Vetsera died with Rudolph on the day of the mysterious Meyerling tragedy; but there was a good deal of unnecessary reticence about her in the narratives written at the time. She figured as “Marie V——,” as “a beautiful Jewess,” etc., etc.; but she was, as a matter of fact, a well-known member of a family which was at that time very well known indeed in Vienna.
Her mother, the Baroness Vetsera, was née Baltazzi; and the Baltazzis were people who were in Viennese society without being of it. Their precise position in that society may be fixed by the fact that they received invitations to the bal beim Hof, but not to the more intimate and exclusive bal am Hof. The people who did not like them called them “rastas,” meaning that they cut a dash, but that the account which they gave of their antecedents was not quite satisfactory to inquisitive aristocrats. They came from Constantinople by way of London, and they threw their money about. One always finds such people even in the most exclusive societies: people whom Society accepts, without taking them to its bosom.
Some of the brothers were—and still are—tolerably well known in England, as well as in their own country. Alexander Baltazzi won the Derby with the Hungarian horse Kisber in 1876. Hector Baltazzi is now connected with the picture-dealing business, and is sometimes to be met at the Ritz Hotel in London—a dapper little man, standing with his hands in his pockets. One of the brothers is prosperously engaged in some mercantile undertaking in Roumania; and both the sisters made good marriages. Evelyn married Count George Stockau; and Helen, with whom we are more immediately concerned, married Baron Vetsera. But the reputation of Helen, Baroness Vetsera, was not without its flaws; and Viennese society did not always exercise charity in determining its attitude towards her. It frequented her entertainments; but it also called her la Baronne Cardinal.
Readers of Halévy’s M. et Madame Cardinal and Les petites Cardinal will understand the significance of that sobriquet. The Madame Cardinal of fiction was the typical mère d’actrice: a well-known French type, distinguished by taking a purely business-like view of a daughter’s attraction for wealthy patrons of the drama. Countess Marie Larisch, who was everybody’s confidante in the matter, depicts the Baroness Vetsera as a woman of exactly that character—albeit, of course, on a more exalted plane. She was not rich, she says, but was living on her capital, relying on her daughters as her assets. They must make wealthy marriages, or failing that——
“Will you,” she asked Countess Marie, “undertake a very difficult mission for me? I want you to talk plainly to the Prince about Mary. You might even give him a hint that matters might be arranged if he is really desperately in love with her. At any rate, I’ve no objection to discussing the matter with the Crown Prince.”
There we have the dots on the i’s in so far as Mary’s mother is concerned. Mary, for her, was an article of merchandise; and Countess Marie was, for her as for the Empress, a heaven-sent “go-between.” Unfortunately, however, from the mother’s point of view, Mary was not an ideal daughter. It is not impossible, Countess Marie thinks, that she might, in cold blood, have fallen in with her mother’s plans. It is certainly not by considerations of morality, Countess Marie maintains, that she would have been restrained from doing so; for those considerations had already gone by the board in the course of an “affair” with an English cavalry officer in Cairo. But Mary’s blood was, at the moment, anything but cold. She was at once infatuated, and vain, and wilful; and all three emotions—wilfulness, and vanity, and infatuation—had combined to prompt her to the same rash course of action. She had a chance—or, at all events, believed that she had one—of marrying Miguel of Braganza; but she preferred Rudolph. She threw herself at Rudolph’s head, and stuck to him like a leech. Rudolph himself declared that she was not like the others—she could not be shaken off.
She had begun by writing to Rudolph, imploring him to see her; and he had plunged into the adventure, as he had plunged into so many previous adventures, with a light heart, not guessing whither it would lead him. She had gone on to insult the Crown Princess—staring her full in the face, and not recognising her presence in a ball-room. Her mother, crimson with anger—for her own social position was obviously imperilled by such behaviour on her daughter’s part—had hurried her off and locked her up in her room; and then Rudolph, hearing what had happened, went to see Countess Marie, and required a service of her:
“Listen. I want you to bring Mary to me at the Hofburg.”
“I assure you it is necessary for me to see Mary. Besides, I myself am in great danger.”
“I must speak to Mary alone; it may possibly help me to escape the trouble which threatens me.”
Those are the essential sentences; and they strike one as madly inconsequent. For why should a private interview with Mary be necessitated by the fact that Rudolph was “in danger”? How could such an interview help him to escape the trouble which threatened him,—that trouble being, as he went on to explain to Countess Marie, political? Countess Marie does not answer these questions; she writes as if she did not even perceive them to be questions which a sceptical critic of her narrative would inevitably ask. She goes on, instead, to speak of Rudolph’s political troubles, and of the part which he called upon her to play in covering them up:
“‘Listen!’ he said. ‘If I were to confide in the Emperor, I should sign my own death warrant.’ My heart nearly stopped beating at this dreadful disclosure, and I could say nothing.”
THE HOFBURG, VIENNA.
Then Rudolph handed Countess Marie a steel casket which he asked her to take charge of, saying:
“It is imperative that it should not be found in my possession, for at any moment the Emperor may order my personal belongings to be seized.”
And then:—
“How long am I to keep this dreadful thing in my possession?”
“Until I ask for it,” answered Rudolph, “or until someone else asks for it. If it should come to that,” he added gravely, “you must know how to act. There is one person who knows the secret of this casket, and he alone has the right (failing me) to ask for its return.”
“His name?”
“Never mind his name. You can deliver it to the person who can tell you four letters. Write them down now, and repeat them after me. Listen: R.I.U.O.”
It is as mysterious, and apparently as meaningless, as any conspiracy in a melodrama or a comic opera; and it may be permissible to mention here that Countess Marie was warned, before her story was printed, that nobody would believe it. She nevertheless insisted. She could not be positive that the casket was of steel, because it was wrapped up in a covering which she did not undo. But it was a casket—or at any rate a box of some kind; and it was heavy. She afterwards handed it over, in circumstances to which we shall come, to the mysterious person who gave the mysterious password; and she related all this in London in a very matter-of-fact manner, which gave her interlocutors the impression that, if her story were not true, it would have been absolutely beyond her capacity to invent it. But, true or false, what relation did it bear to the necessity for a private interview with Mary at the Hofburg?
That is what Countess Marie does not explain; and her failure to see that any explanation is required and will be demanded may perhaps be taken as an indirect proof of her bona fides. An inventor would not have failed to supply the missing link, which neither a criminal investigator nor a sensational novelist would have any difficulty in conjecturing. Granted that Rudolph had involved himself in a political plot—whether to get himself crowned King of Hungary or for any other purpose—then the whole of the evidence relating to the plot cannot have been contained in the mysterious steel casket. Some further evidence—a letter or some other scrap of paper—must have been in Mary Vetsera’s possession. She must have been holding it over Rudolph’s head as an instrument of blackmail—demanding, perhaps, that he should divorce his wife and marry her; or, at all events, he must have suspected her of the intention to do so, and have wanted to get the document back from her. On that assumption—but on no other—the political necessity of the interview on which Rudolph insisted is clear.
In any case, he did insist; and Countess Marie yielded to his entreaties. The allegation has been made that he offered her a pecuniary inducement to do so; but there is no reason for believing that. It would have been worth his while; but it can hardly have been necessary. So she found a pretext, drove Mary to the Hofburg, and left her there. “I want,” Rudolph said, “to keep Mary with me for two days, in order to come to an easy understanding with the Baroness over her.” He also said, alluding to the political trouble: “A great deal may happen in two days, and I want Mary to be with me”—for what reason (seeing that, according to the same narrator, he had spoken of Mary as a woman who refused to be shaken off) we are left to guess.
And so Mary was whisked away to Meyerling; whence the telegraph presently sped the first intimation of the famous and mysterious tragedy.