It was said that she was proud. It was believed that she was ambitious. It was admitted that she had once been beautiful. In the days before her marriage, when she was still the heiress to the Duchy of Schwerin-Strelitz, she had been flattered with the title of the belle of Europe. In her thirty-sixth year she was still handsome and commanding, but the youthful loveliness had disappeared. What years had failed to do had been wrought more surely by disappointed hope and wounded pride. In the words of Count von Stahlen, the Court wit, the Princess Hermengarde was an old woman of middle age.
Her mortifications had begun, when she was still under twenty, with the birth of a male heir to her father’s Grand Duchy. Before that event she had been looked upon as one of the most brilliant matches in Europe, and Austrian archdukes and British princes of the blood were said to have made overtures for her hand. When the blow fell which reduced her at one stroke to a position of insignificance, two royal wooers, who had been contending for her smiles immediately before, withdrew from their courtship with a precipitation which, in a lower class of life, might have exposed them to the suspicion of being fortune hunters. One of them went off in hot haste to St. Petersburg, where he was just in time to secure a Grand Duchess of the house of Romanoff. The other, not quite so fortunate, fell back upon a Scandinavian princess.
It was while still smarting from these insulting desertions, that Hermengarde had consented to accept the hand of Otto, the younger brother of Leopold IX. The match was a brilliant enough one in the fallen state of her fortunes, though far different to such an alliance as had seemed at one time within her reach. At this time Maximilian, Leopold’s only child, was a delicate boy of twelve, and there being no other life between Prince Otto and the throne, his wife might still cherish the possibility of one day reigning over a kingdom.
But the unfortunate young Princess had not yet exhausted the enmity of fortune. Within a few months of their marriage, Otto began to show traces of that savage cruelty which seemed to be part of the hereditary taint in the Franconian line. For a long time his proud young wife submitted in silence, and allowed no hint of her sufferings to reach the outside world. But when her son was born, and her husband’s senseless brutality went so far as to threaten the infant, her maternal instinct and her ambition together took arms, and she faced her tyrant with unexpected courage. Strange things were related in the gossip of the Court concerning the scenes which took place between the Franconian Prince and the mother of his child. The miserable state of affairs culminated, it was said, in the haughty Princess fleeing at midnight from her apartments, clad in little beside a cloak, and bearing her child in her arms, to take refuge in the quarters of the Baron von Sigismark, Comptroller of the Household, and his wife, from the murderous violence of her husband.
Immediately afterwards Prince Otto went mad, or rather his madness was officially announced. Hermengarde went into retirement, devoting herself to the training of her son; but after the deaths of her husband and of King Leopold, she had returned to the Court, where she lived on good terms with her nephew, and discharged some of the functions which would have fallen to a queen-consort, had Maximilian been married.
Her apartments in the left wing of the Castle of Neustadt corresponded in situation with those occupied by the King himself in the right wing, and looked out over the decorated gardens to the belt of forest beyond. On this particular afternoon the Princess had been sitting in the window of her boudoir, gazing abstractedly out upon the park, while a look of deep thought rested on her proud features. It was her habit to sit thus, with her chin resting upon her hand. In the days of her youthful triumphs, a portrait of her, in this attitude, had been circulated all over Europe, and perhaps it was this recollection which had caused her to adopt the posture as a favourite one ever since. By-and-by she had tired of waiting alone, and struck a small silver gong by her side.
The summons was obeyed by the page in attendance.
“Karl Fink has not been here?” inquired the Princess.
“No, Madam, not yet.”
“Go and see who is in the ante-room, and bring me word.”