5
The emperor, who refused to die, lived by sheer energy for two days longer, with his perforated lungs, panting for breath.
And such were the Liparians: the man, the murderer, seized in the opera-house, despite the police and the guard, had been battered into a shapeless mass by the malcontents themselves....
And such is life: the emperor of a great country was shot dead by a fanatic in the midst of his kith and kin and life went on.... The country was as extensive as before: a rich, naturally beautiful, southern empire; tall, snow-clad mountains in the north; medieval and modern towns, lying in broad provinces; the residential capital itself, white in its golden autumn sunshine, with its Imperial, beneath a blue sky, close to the blue sea, round which circled the quays....
And such is the life of rulers: the emperor lay dead, killed by a simple pistol-shot; and the court chamberlain was very busy, the masters of ceremonies unable to agree; the pomp of an imperial funeral was prepared in all its intricacy; through all Europe sped the after-shudder of fright; every newspaper was filled with telegrams and long articles....
All this was because of one shot from a fanatic, a martyr for the people's rights.
The Empress Elizabeth stared with wide-open eyes at the fate that had overtaken her. Not thus had she ever pictured to herself that it would come, thus, so rudely, in the midst of that festivity and in the presence of their royal guest; thus, glancing past her, striking only her husband and not crushing them all, at one blow, all their imperial pride! It had come to pass and ... she still feared, she still went on fearing, more now than before: for her son!... It seemed to her as if she were fearing for the first time....
It was the day before the funeral of the Emperor Oscar, when the Duchess of Xara, now the young empress, was seized with indisposition and the doctors declared that she was enceinte.
The emperor's remains had already been removed in great pomp to Altara. At St. Ladislas the Altarians were to see him lying in state between thousands of flaming candles, with the brilliant insignia of the supreme power at his feet; after that he was to be removed to the imperial vault in the cathedral....
On that day too at Lipara, whose whiteness took tones of sombre twilight beneath mourning decorations and flags flown at half-mast, the salutes from Fort Wenceslas echoed over the town, thundering in dull tones their regular, heavy, monotonous bombardment of farewell. Lonely, majestically, in the town resounding with the salutes, stood the Imperial, empty, with its caryatids staring with gloomy, downcast eyes. The young emperor, Othomar XII., was at Altara, leading the solemn procession. The empress-mother was at the Crown Palace, with the young Empress Valérie.... Over their glamour, still shining, shone new glamours, in life which had continued, which was continuing still....
The two empresses sat side by side. Valérie held Elizabeth gently in her arms; at regular intervals the guns boomed from the fort, through the palace...
Then Elizabeth drew herself up painfully from her daughter-in-law's arms and spoke in low, oracular tones:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara.... He would so much have liked to see a Count of Lycilia...."
The guns boomed; the two empresses, in deep mourning, wept and sobbed. And now for the first time after a long interval—as there had also been a long interval at Berengar's death—Elizabeth realized all her loss, her sorrow, her misery, her despair; and she felt that that emperor, to whom, as a very young princess, now four-and-twenty years ago, she had been given in marriage, without love, she had come to love in this quarter of a century of their life in common on his high pinnacle of sovereignty....
That evening Othomar returned and, alone with his wife, with his mother, he sobbed with them, the young emperor, whom no one had seen weeping in the cathedral at Altara. For the Empress Elizabeth had repeated yet once more:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara...."
And then the Emperor of Liparia had lost his self-restraint. In one lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation, his melancholy and his despair?
And then with irrepressible sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the menace of the future, he sobbed out his grief for his father who had been and his son who was to be! He sobbed, with his head in the arms of his young empress, who, suddenly realizing that she must comfort him, had grown calm and looked calmly down upon him, taking their life of majesty upon her shoulders as though it were an oppressive, heavy mantle of purple and ermine and nothing more, taking it up so valiantly because there flowed in her veins as in his one single drop of sacred golden blood, common to all of their order, their might upon earth and their right before God....