Another sudden exodus occurred once, when the whole Court, including the Emperor, were for the first time installed for the winter in Belle Vue, with its charming garden, which had been recommended by the doctors as a salutary change from the Schloss in the Lust-Garten, which possesses only a few sooty trees on a grass plot two yards square.
Everybody was delighted with the innovation, and the last dresses were being hung in the wardrobes, the finishing touches given to the delightfully quaint, sunny little freshly-painted rooms overlooking the green Tier-Garten, when a rumour ran shuddering through the palace. We were to pack up at once and return to the gloomy old Schloss at the other end of the town. Prince Oskar, just returned from Italy, had developed chicken-pox—that very catching illness—and was to remain in Belle Vue with his adjutant and servants, while the rest of us migrated elsewhere.
So all the luggage had to be re-packed, and before evening we had retired from the chicken-pox, only to find that after all it had come with us—for the young Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein, who was staying at the Court, and had just become engaged to her cousin Prince August Wilhelm, the Emperor’s fourth son, fell ill of the complaint almost immediately; but we remained where we were and did not travel farther.
Their Majesties were due to pay a visit to England in a few days’ time, and many telegrams passed between the two countries, the Prussian Court fearing to bring the chicken-pox with them, while the English one implored them to come all the same, as nobody there was the least afraid of it. The upshot was that the visit was paid, the Germans spending an apprehensive week in England, always on the alert for symptoms which happily never appeared.
Some time afterwards, the Empress in discussing this outbreak of chicken-pox remarked that she had not been at all anxious about any one but the Emperor. It was entirely for his sake that the doctors had thought it well to move from Belle Vue.
“No, not at all,” vehemently spoke His Majesty, who happened to overhear what his wife said. “I had chicken-pox long ago when I was a boy. I wasn’t at all afraid of it.”
“But, Wilhelm!” said the astonished Empress, “I never knew. Why didn’t you say so then?”
“Nobody asked me,” said the Emperor grimly; “the doctors ordered us off, and there was the end of it. They never told me that it was on my account. I thought that you were afraid of it.”
This is the kind of thing that is apt to occur when people try to be a little too tactful.
“I don’t know,” said the Princess, “why we fly about so much trying to run away from various diseases; we must be always meeting and swallowing microbes.”