Majesty: A Novel

by Louis Couperus

4

A spirit of gloom seemed to haunt the ringing marble halls of the Imperial, a dim melancholy to stifle the cadences of the voices and their echoes and to hang from the tall ceilings as it had been a heavy web of atmosphere. It was autumn; the first parties were to take place; the first court-ball was given. But it seemed to be given because there was no help for it: it was a slow, official, tedious function. The more intimate circles of the Imperial, those of the Duchess of Yemena and the diplomatic body, regretted the more select assemblies in the smaller rooms of the empress. They looked upon those great balls as necessary inflictions. The empress' smaller dances, however, were always favoured as most charming entertainments. But the empress had decided that they should not take place, because of the illness of the crown-prince. At this first great ball their majesties appeared only for a brief moment, to take part in the imperial quadrille....

Grey ashes fell over the glittering mood of imperial festivity which so short a time ago had been the usual atmosphere of the palace. The dinners, once the glories of day after day, were shortened; only the most necessary invitations were given. The emperor himself maintained a constant mood of sullenness: the army bill for the augmentation of the active forces was still attacked in principle in the house of deputies; and the emperor was resolved at all costs to uphold his minister of war. Moreover, thanks to the dash of childishness that showed through all his energy, he had not recovered from his disappointment at the postponement of the Duke of Xara's marriage. He seemed in a continual state of irritation because his Liparian world would not go as he wanted it to go.

Neither the empress nor the prince himself thought it a favourable moment to communicate the mournful resolution to the emperor. But for this very reason the empress began silently to cherish fresh hope. Nothing had been said yet: the humiliating secret existed only between her son and herself. Humiliating, because what public reason could he allege for resigning the succession? What pretext would sound plausible enough to conceal the true motive of weakness and impotence? And yet he was her child and Oscar's! It seemed to the empress unfeasible to communicate Othomar's wish to his father and to tell the emperor that his own son had no capacity for government. Oh, what sacrifice would she not be prepared to make, if only she could spare her child this humiliation! But was he really so powerless to master himself and to draw himself up, proudly, under the weight of what was as yet no more than a prince's coronet? Had she but known how to counteract his discouragement; but she had merely sobbed, merely given way before his despair; in vain had she sought in his soul the secret spring that should cause him to rise from the impotence into which the languor of his reflections had made him sink.... And yet she felt that there must be a secret spring, because she instinctively divined its presence in the souls of all her equals: it was the mystery of their sovereignty, the reason why they were sovereigns, the reason of their prerogative. She possessed the adorable, child-like faith that in them, the crowned heads, there exists a common essence of distinction which raises them above the crowd: that single drop of sacred blood in their veins, that single atom of inherited divinity, which sheds lustre through their souls. She believed in their high exclusive right of majesty. Because she believed in that even as she believed in her sinfulness as a human being and in the absolution of her confessor, the Archbishop of Lipara, she could never for one instant doubt their right divine as rulers. Whatever people might think, or write, or want different, theirs was the right: of this she was certain, as certain as of the Trinity. That Othomar had doubted the existence of God had struck her as impious, but it had not shattered her so much as his disbelief in their right. Was he alone then lacking in that essence of distinction, that sacred golden drop of blood, that divine atom? And, if he lacked it, if he, the crown-prince, lacked majesty, was this monstrous lack her fault, the fault of the mother who bore him?

The suspicion of this guilt crushed her; and before she even dared to speak to Othomar she humbled herself before the archbishop. The prelate, alarmed at these portents in the mysterious melancholy of the Imperial, had scarcely known how to comfort her. After that, she remained prostrate for hours before her crucifix. She prayed with all her soul, prayed for light for herself and for her son, prayed for strength and that the spark might descend upon Othomar. When she had prayed thus, so long and with such conviction, there came over her, like an afflatus of the Holy Ghost, a sense of peace. She became herself again, she awaited events, regained her credulous fatalism, her conviction that nothing happens but what must happen and is right. What was wrong did not happen. If it were fated that Othomar must receive that spark, that would be right; if it were fated that he must abdicate, that would be right too, O God, right with a strange, inscrutable rightness!...

Because the days had passed without her having yet spoken to the emperor, she hoped anew; she hoped that Othomar would be his old self again and no longer seek his own degradation. But it was as though she hoped in spite of everything; for, each time that she now saw Othomar, she found him duller and more exhausted, more helpless beneath the certainty of his weakness. Professor Barzia, who treated the prince personally and twice a day gave him his cold-water douche in the palace, seemed to be least uneasy about Othomar's physical weakness. The prince was not robust, but the professor divined in his delicate constitution the presence of the element that had sprung from the first rough, sensual strength of the Czyrkiski race: the Slavonic element, which had become enervated through its Latin admixtures, but had lingered on; a secret toughness, an indestructible factor of unsuspected firmness, which lay deep down, like a foundation, and upon which much seemed to be built that was very slender and fragile. What had once been rude strength the professor believed he had discovered in a certain toughness; what had been cruelty and lust, in a certain enervation, which had hitherto been held in check by self-restraint and a spontaneous sense of duty, but which now suddenly revealed itself in this excessive lassitude. Barzia distinctly perceived in Othomar the scion of his ancestors; and he considered that, though the rich physical vigour of the original sovereign blood had become refined, as if it were now flowing more thinly through feebler veins, yet that blood was not so impoverished that the delicacy of this future emperor need be ascribed to racial exhaustion. Possibly Barzia's sudden affection for the prince tinged this physiological diagnosis with excessive optimism; at any rate, the professor had not the least fear of this fragility, or even of this nervous weakness. What he did fear was lest those mental qualities which had so suddenly endeared the prince to him should not be able to maintain themselves during this period of fatigue and exhaustion. Spontaneous, unreflected, uncalculated he knew those virtues to be in the prince, as it were a treasure unknown to himself: would they be lost, now, in these mournful days, or would they remain, perhaps develop, become more and more refined, make up to Othomar in moral strength for what he lacked in physical strength and in this way cure him? For the professor knew it: these qualities alone could effect a cure....

Othomar himself thought neither of his virtues nor of his blood: he thought of his future and thought of it with an hourly-increasing dread. When the empress asked Barzia whether this rest would be good for the prince and whether distraction would not be better, the professor declared that the prince had had plenty of distraction lately. He must first get over his fatigue, get over it entirely; it mattered less with what the prince kept his brain occupied for the moment....

But Barzia did not mean this altogether and would doubtless have been very far from meaning it at all, had he known of what the prince was thinking, or been fully able to judge his utter lack of mental elasticity.

And the days passed by. Othomar did not mention his resolution to the empress again, desiring to give her as little pain as possible; neither did the empress allude to it: she hoped on.

But in Othomar's meditations it revolved incessantly, like a wheel: he was able to do nothing for his people and yet he loved them; he did not know how to govern them, he would abdicate his rights and his title of crown-prince: Berengar should become Duke of Xara....

The small prince came and paid his brother a short visit every morning; he always wore his little uniform, looking like a sturdy little general in miniature, and Othomar watched him with a smile.

Was there no wish to rule in the boy's medieval little brain, was there no jealousy in his passionate little heart? Othomar remembered the history of Liparia, in the cruel times of their early middle-ages, that terrible drama—they still showed at St. Ladislas the chamber where it had been enacted—that second son stabbing his elder brother in his lust for the crown and hurling the corpse from an oriel window into the Zanthos, which flowed beneath the fortress. What had the boy inherited of this rivalry? And, though this rivalry had been wholly refined into less salient feelings, would not an immense happiness enter Berengar's small princely soul if he were to learn that he might be crown-prince now and that one day he would be ... emperor? But what would the boy think of him, Othomar, for giving away all this magnificence of his own free will? Would he despise him, while yet feeling grateful to him, or would he cherish mistrust, suspecting a lurking mystery behind all this greatness, which Othomar cast from him?...

At such times Othomar would draw the little fellow to him with silent compassion, but would take pleasure in feeling the firm muscles of his sturdy little arms and listening to his short, crisp little speeches. Then Berengar rode away and Djalo was allowed to run with him through the park: in an hour he would bring the dog back to Othomar and talk with great importance of his lessons, which were just beginning.

And, when Berengar had gone, Othomar lay thinking about him in his long hours of reverie, already looked upon his brother as actually crown-prince, erased his own name from the list of future sovereigns, thought of what he would do when he was cured and had shaken off the last remnant of his purple, remembered his uncle Xaverius, who was the abbot of a monastery, and pictured himself studying, compiling works on history and sociology....