For simple Isabel is soon to be
Among the dead ...”
She was married early in September. When she had been told that it was to be, she had simply acquiesced, quite quietly, quite gravely. “To make him happy”—she had not forgotten the wistful words—almost his last—and the withholding of the sign was proof that the sacred injunction was not rescinded. If his dear ghost still held her to that sacrifice, there must be reasons for it hidden among the inscrutable silences. Perhaps that way alone lay the end she so wearied for. If this poor residue from all which exalted life above its material perishableness was enough for Joseph’s content, she valued it too little to grudge it him. Let him be happy with it, if he would and could.
And so she was married, quite quietly, as befitted her mourning, in the ducal palace at Parma. The ceremony was performed by proxy, the Prince of Liechtenstein representing his royal master, and immediately following it the new archduchess set out for Vienna. It is enough for our remaining purpose to record the whole-heartedness of her reception there by that susceptible young man, her husband, who had only once before in his life seen the face which was now to awaken in him the liveliest emotions of love. Isabella much more than justified the archduke’s earlier impression of her: he found her beautiful and desirable beyond all expectation, and he laid his soul then and there at her feet, with assurances of its eternal dedication to her love and service.
Eternity was a big, sad word in that connection of expediency, and tragic, because it could never be more than a one-sided compact. She had nothing but a temporal gift to offer him in exchange for it, but she lent to that what grace she could through the pathetic sweetness of its giving. He deserved only kindness of her; he had had no voice, no hand, no knowledge, in the deed which had been his gain. And what a little gain, after all! It seemed hardly worth all this plotting, all this wreck of lives and ruin of souls to end on such a paltry acquisition. It were as though a party of musicians had fought for the possession of a delicate instrument, with which in the meantime they had been belabouring one another.
It is said that on the bridal evening, when left alone together in their room, the young wife turned to her husband with some expression of this thought upon her lips. She had been looking from the window, into the blown star-lit darknesses of a night such as that which had imprinted for ever its death-shadow upon her soul, and the emotion of that piteous memory was alive and terrible in her. She looked into his face, an intense and appealing sadness in her own, and clasping her hands as if in prayer, spoke to him:
“I will try to be to you a good wife, during the three years we shall remain together.”
“How?” he answered, amazed: “what is this arbitrary limit?”
“I do not know,” she said, sighing: “only something tells me it will not be longer.”
What had he to do, then, but, in his exultant happiness, laugh to scorn her fears, take her to his impassioned arms, declare the immortality of their union? She was overwrought, he said, oppressed by fancies born of change and recent sorrow. In the creative fire of love all those dismal spectres would pass consumed, leaving new life and hope to spring from out their ashes.