5
These were autumn days. The sunny blue of the sky was often clouded with grey; in the morning the winds blew from the north, blew over the sea till it became the colour of steel; then the sun broke through and shone very warmly for a couple of hours, with an occasional cold blast, suddenly and treacherously rushing round the corners of the streets; then, at four or half-past four o'clock, the sun was extinguished and the pale sky was left exhaling its icy chillness on the open harbour, between the white palaces, in the streets and squares.
It was a treacherous time of year: the empress and Berengar had caught cold driving in an open carriage; they both kept their rooms and Othomar in his turn went to visit them; the empress was coughing, the little prince had a temperature; there was never so much illness about as now, the doctors declared. And a melancholy continued to brood through the halls of the Imperial, through the whole town, where the imperial family were no longer seen at the opera and at parties. Never had the daily dinners at the Imperial been so short, with so few guests; and it made an insurmountably sad impression not to see the empress seated next to the emperor, delicate, distinguished, august, but in her stead the Princess Thera, who seemed quite incapable of bringing a smile to Oscar's grim and peevish features.
Othomar did not even know that those about the empress were anxious on her behalf: she always received him with all the cheerfulness that she could muster, in spite of the pain on her chest; the doctors told him nothing, no one gave him the bulletins, every one tried to spare him; and besides there was really less anxiety in the Imperial than in the town and throughout the country. But the little prince received Othomar with less meekness than did the empress; and every day there were silent rages, sulking displays against the doctors for keeping him in bed.
Once, when the crown-prince came to see Berengar, the doctors were with him; the fever had increased, but the little prince wanted to get out of bed; he was naughty, used ugly names, had even struck the good-natured, big-headed doctor and pummelled him with his little clenched fist.
"As soon as you're better, Berengar," said Othomar, after first reproving him, "I shall make you a present."
"What of?" asked the boy, eagerly. "But I am better now!"
"No, no, you must do what the doctors tell you and not vex them."
"And what will you give me then?"
Othomar looked at him long and firmly.
"What shall I have then?" repeated the child.
"I mustn't tell you yet, Berengar; it's really rather big for you still."
"What is it then? A horse?"
"No, it's not as big as a horse, but heavier. Don't ask any more about it and also don't try and guess what it is, but be obedient: then you'll get better and then you shall have it."
"Heavier than a horse and not so big!..." Berengar pondered, with glowing cheeks.
With his head bowed on his breast, dragging his footsteps, Othomar returned to his room. He stayed there for hours, sitting silently, gloomily, in the same attitude; as usual, he did not appear at dinner and hardly ate what Andro brought him. Then he went to lie down on his couch, took up a book to read, but put it down again and raised himself up, as though with a sudden impulse:
"Why not now?" he thought. "Why keep on postponing it?..."
Night fell, but the upper corridors of the palace were not yet lighted; dragging his fatigue through this dusky shadow, Othomar went to the emperor's anterooms. The chamberlain announced him.
Oscar sat at his writing-table, pen in hand.
"Am I disturbing you, papa? Or can I speak to you?"
"No, you're not disturbing me.... Have you been to see mamma?"
"Yes, this afternoon; she was pretty well, but Berengar's temperature was higher."
The emperor glanced up at him:
"Worse than this morning?"
"I don't know: he was rather feverish."
The emperor rose:
"Do you want to talk to me?"
"Yes, papa."
"Wait a moment, then. I've not been to Berengar yet to-day."
He went out, leaving the door ajar.
Othomar remained alone. He sat down. He looked round the great work-room, which he knew so well from their morning consultations with the chancellor. Lately, however, he had not attended these. He thought over what he should say; meanwhile his eyes wandered around; they fell upon the great mirror with its gilt arabesques; something seemed strange to him. Then he rose and walked up to the glass:
"I was under the impression there was a flaw near the top of it," he thought. "I can't well be mistaken. Has it been renewed?"
He was still standing by the looking-glass, when Oscar returned:
"Berengar is not at all well; the fever is increasing," he said; and the tone of his voice hesitated. "Mamma is with him...."
Absorbed as he was in his own meditations, it did not strike Othomar that the little prince must have become worse for the empress, who was herself ill, to go to him.
"And about what did you want to speak to me?" asked the emperor, as the prince remained silent.
"About Berengar, papa."
"About Berengar?"
"About Berengar and myself. I have been contrasting myself with him, papa. We are brothers, we are both your sons. Which of us, do you think, takes most after you ... and ... our ancestors?"
"What are you driving at, Othomar?"
"At what is right, papa: right and just. Nature is sometimes unjust and blind; she ought to have let Berengar be born first and me next ... or even left me out altogether."
"Once more, what are you driving at, Othomar?"
"Can't you see, papa? I will tell you. Is Berengar not more of a monarch than I am? Is that not why he's your favourite? And ought I to deprive him of his natural rights for the sake of my traditional rights? I want to abdicate in his favour, papa. I want to abdicate everything, all my rights."
"The boy's mad," muttered Oscar.
"All my rights," repeated Othomar, dreamily, as though he foresaw the future: his little brother crowned.
"Othomar, are you raving?" asked the emperor.
"Papa, I am not raving. What I am now telling you I have thought over for days, perhaps weeks; I don't know: time passes so quickly.... What I am telling you I have discussed with mamma: it made her cry, but she did not oppose me. She looks at it as I do.... And what I tell you holds good; I have made up my mind and nothing can make me change it.... I am fond of Berengar; I am glad to give up everything to him; and I shall pray that he may become happy through my gift. I am convinced—and so are you—that Berengar will make a better emperor than I. What talent do I possess for ruling?..."
He shrugged his shoulders in helplessness, with a nervous shudder that jolted them:
"None," he answered himself. "I have no talent, I can do nothing. I do not know how to decide—as now—nor how to act; I shall always be a dreamer. Why then should I be emperor and he nothing more than the commander-in-chief of my army or my fleet? Surely that can't be right; that can't have been what nature intended.... Papa, I give it him, my birthright, and I ... I shall know how to live, if I must...."
The emperor had listened to him with his elbows on the table and his hands under his chin and now sat staring at him with his small, pinched eyes:
"Do you mean all this?" he asked.
"Yes, papa."
"You're not delirious?"
"No, papa, I'm not delirious."
"Then you're mad."
The emperor rose:
"Then you're mad, I tell you. Othomar, realize that you're mad and return to your senses; don't become quite insane."
"Why do you call me insane, papa? Can't you agree with me that Berengar would be better than I?"
His father's cruel glances stabbed Othomar through and through:
"No, you're not insane in that; you're right there...."
"And why, then, am I insane because I wish, for that reason, to abdicate in his favour?"
"Because it's impossible, Othomar."
"What law prevents me?"
"My will, Othomar."
The prince drew himself up proudly:
"Your will?" he cried. "Your will? You acknowledge that I am nothing of a prince except by birth? You acknowledge that Berengar does possess your capacity for ruling and you will not, you will not have me abdicate? And you think that I shall fall in with that will?..."
He uttered a hoarse laugh:
"No, papa, I shall pay no heed to that will. You can carry through your will in everything, but not in this. Though you called out your whole army, you could not prevail against me here. There is a limit to the power of human will, papa, and nothing, nothing, nothing can prevent me from considering myself unfit to reign and from refusing to wear a crown!"
The emperor seized Othomar's wrists; his hot breath hissed in Othomar's face:
"You damned cub!" he snarled between his large, white teeth. "You wretched nincompoop! You're right: there's nothing of the emperor in you; there never will be. If I didn't know better, I'd say you were the son of a footman. You're right, you're incompetent. You're nothing: our crown doesn't fit you. And yet, though I had to lock you up in a prison, so that no one might hear of your baseness, you shall not abdicate your rights. My will extends farther than you can see. Do you hear? You shan't do it, you shan't resign, though from this moment onwards I have to hide you, as a disgrace, from the world. Your slack brain can't understand that, can it? You can't understand that I'm fonder of Berengar than of a poltroon like you and that nevertheless I won't have him as my successor in your stead? Then I shall have to tell you. I won't have it, so as not to let the world see the degeneration of our race. I will not have the world know how pitiably we have deteriorated in you; and I would rather ... I would rather murder you than allow you to abdicate!"
Fiercely Oscar took the prince by his shoulders, pushed him backwards on a couch, on which Othomar sank in a huddled attitude, while his father continued to hold him like a prey in the grip of his strong hands:
"But I tell you," continued the emperor, "I tell you, you are not the son of a footman, you are my son; and I shall not murder you, because I am your father. I will only say this to you, Othomar: you might have spared me this. I believe you have a high opinion of your own delicacy of feeling, but you have not the very least feeling. You do not even feel that you have been contemplating a villainy, the villainy of a proletarian, a slave, a pariah, a wretch. You have not felt even for an instant the pain you would cause me by such an infamy. You saw that I was fonder of your brother; you thought that I should approve of your cowardly proposal. Not for a moment did the thought occur to you that, with that cowardice of yours, you would give me the greatest pain that I could ever experience!..."
Othomar, utterly crushed, had fallen back upon the couch. He was no longer able to distinguish what was just and what was true; he no longer knew himself at that minute; his father's words lashed his soul like whips. And he felt no strength within him to resist them: the insulting reproaches kept him down, as though he had been thrashed. Infamy and disgrace, insanity and degeneration: he collapsed beneath them; he gulped down the mud of them, till he felt like suffocating. And that he did not suffocate and continued to breathe, continued to live, that the light was bright around him, that things remained unchanged, that the outside world knew nothing: all this was despair to him. For a moment he thought of his mother. But he wished for darkness, for death, to hide himself, himself and his shame, his degeneration, the leprosy of his pariah-temperament.... It flashed through him in the second after that last lash of reproach, flashed across his despondent soul. He knew that Oscar always kept a loaded revolver in an open pigeon-hole of his writing-table. His brain grew tense in the effort of thinking how to reach it. He rose, approached the pigeon-hole; suddenly he sprang towards it, stretched out his hand and seized the pistol....
Did Oscar believe that his son had been driven mad by his last words and now wanted his father's life? Did he perceive this ecstasy of suicide in his offspring, was his quivering brain penetrated by the horrible thought that self-destruction would be the pariah's last refuge? Be this as it might, he rushed at Othomar. But the prince lightly leapt out of his reach, pointed the revolver, with wild eyes, with distorted features, in senseless despair, upon himself, upon his own forehead, on which the veins swelled blue....
"Othomar!" roared the emperor.
At this moment hurried footsteps were heard outside, confused words sounded in the anteroom and the Marquis of Xardi, the emperor's aide-de-camp, alarmed and flurried, threw the door wide open....
"Sir!" he exclaimed. "The empress asks if your majesty will come to Prince Berengar this instant...."
The shot had gone off, into the wall. Blood dripped from Othomar's ear. The emperor had caught hold of the crown-prince and torn the revolver, still loaded in five chambers, from him; a second shot went off in that brief moment of struggle, into the ceiling, Othomar remained standing vacantly.
"Marquis!" the emperor hissed out at Xardi. "I don't know what you think, but I tell you this: you've seen nothing, you think nothing. What happened here before you came in ... did not happen."
He pointed his finger, threateningly at Xardi:
"Should you ever forget, marquis, that it did not happen, then I shall forget who you are, though your pedigree dates back farther than ours!"
Xardi stood deathly pale before his emperor:
"My God, sir!..."
"What do you mean by entering your sovereign's room in this unmannerly fashion? Even the Duke of Xara has himself announced, marquis!"
"Sir...."
"What? Speak up!..."
"Her majesty...."
"Well, her majesty?"
"Prince Berengar ... the fever has increased ... he is delirious, sir, and the doctors ..."
The emperor turned pale:
"Is he dead?" he asked, fiercely. "Tell me at once."
"Not dead, sir, but...."
"But what?"
"But the doctors ... have no hope...."
With an oath of anguish the emperor pushed the aide aside and darted out of the room.
The prince remained standing. Life returned to him: a reality full of anguish, born of nightmare. His eyes swam with tears:
"Xardi," he implored, "Xardi ... your house has always been loyal to our house; swear to me that you will be silent."
The marquis looked at the crown-prince in consternation:
"Highness...."
"Swear to me, Xardi."
"I swear to you, highness," said the aide, subdued; and he stretched out his fingers to the crucifix hanging on the wall.
Othomar pressed his hand:
"Did Prince Berengar...." He could scarcely speak. "Did Prince Berengar become so ill suddenly?..."
"The fever is increasing every moment, highness, and he is delirious...."
"I will go to him," said Othomar.
He wiped the blood from his ear with his handkerchief and held the cambric, which was at once soaked through, against it.
In the last anteroom he passed the chamberlain and looked at him askance.
Xardi stopped for a moment:
"The Duke of Xara has hurt himself slightly," he said. "He was examining the emperor's revolver when I went in and he started: two shots went off."
"I heard them," whispered the chamberlain, pale as death.
"There might have been an accident...."
They were silent for a moment; their glances were full of understanding; a shudder crept down their backs. The chill night seemed to be descending over the palace as with clouds of evil omen.
"And ... the little prince?..." asked the chamberlain, shivering.
Xardi shrugged his shoulders; his eyes grew moist, through innate, immemorial love for his sovereigns:
"Dying," he answered, faintly.