Meantime the young mother had fled, taking her second son with her. She made her way, almost dead with grief, to her ancestral home, where she claimed the protection of her father. Enraged by Ferdinand’s open violation of the wedding contract, the Duke of Parma espoused her cause with all the vigour of which he was capable, and received the full support of the Church.
Ferdinand was most anxious to end the scandal, and to coax the Princess back to Sofia. With that end in view he obeyed a summons issued by Pope Leo XIII, which, as a good Catholic, he would have had some difficulty in ignoring. Strong in the virtue of his princely rank, and in the dignity of a recent interview with the Sultan of Turkey, a Pagan potentate, in which Ferdinand sported the red fez of vassaldom, Ferdinand made his way to Rome with a quiet confidence in his own rectitude and his mother’s influence.
He entered the Vatican for his interview with every appearance of smirking self-satisfaction. The interview was but a short one; it lasted only a few minutes, but much can happen in a few minutes. No other man was present, and there is no record of what took place at the meeting.
But when Ferdinand sneaked out of the presence, abashed and humiliated, and fled from Rome with no word; when months passed before he entirely recovered the jauntiness of his demeanour, it needs no great quality of imagination to guess that he received a notable rebuke. For some years he endured the stern displeasure of Rome, and the ban, almost amounting to excommunication was only lifted many years later at the strongly expressed wish of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, whose assassination was the signal for the great world conflict in which we are still engaged.
The Princess never recovered from that blow. In course of time she was induced to return to her husband, bringing with her the child Cyril. But now she was a drooping flower, with no hope of ever reviving. She walked through the weary round of her Court duties, and bore two daughters to the father who had made of his son and heir an apostate. She only lived one day after the birth of the second girl, when this gentle woman died of her wrongs.
But Ferdinand was satisfied. He had made his peace with Russia, and the Red Sultan called him Royal Highness. He was now on the side of the clerical plotters of his kingdom, and wore the hall-mark of Bulgarian ecclesiasticism. He even talked of giving his own open adherence to the Orthodox Church, though this has never been done.
In the meantime he had provided an Orthodox heir to the throne, and by the act had mitigated the dread of assassination that had for so long hag-ridden him. For assassination was ever the terror that haunted Ferdinand’s mind. He lived for ever with the dread spectre at his elbow, and he had reason for his dread. For, as we shall now see, assassination was a familiar political weapon in Bulgaria before the arrival of Ferdinand, who can claim credit for remarkable improvements upon the crude methods in vogue before his era of subsidized slaughter.
THE BUTCHERED “BISMARCK”
“If any ordinary citizen of any State had been so incriminated as Prince Ferdinand has been, the man would have been arrested.” —“Vossische Zeitung.”