The Emperor, broken in spirit and body, acquiesced weakly.
“Rest!” he murmured, as if invoking a saint, “undisturbed slumbers and a few hours in which to forget a bleeding, beaten nation that cries out for the help I cannot give.”
Thus it was that Franz Joseph came to go to Schoenbrunn, but forgetfulness did not come to him with the darkening of the lights around his bed. The whole sad picture of his reign passed in review before him like a horrid nightmare—murdered relatives, degenerate heirs who had disgraced his name, and, finally, apparitions of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenberg, whose assassination by Serbs at Sarajevo had been used as the excuse for the war now convulsing the world.
There stood the ghastly shades of the Emperor’s dearly beloved son and his wife whom Franz Joseph never would recognize. They extended bloody, mutilated hands to the old man and seemed to say:
“See, we are come to take you with us to where countless thousands of our countrymen lately have gone. Come, Franz Joseph!”
With a strangling cry of terror, the aged Emperor awoke and half started up in his bed. At that instant there came quick, catlike footfalls in the outer rooms, a gurgling shout that ended in a groan from the halberdiers who kept watch by the door, and then the heavy curtains screening the bed were wrenched violently aside and a terrible figure towered over the palsied Emperor.
It was Black-beard, his huge, knotty hands working spasmodically as if already strangling the poor old man in imagination. Behind him appeared the villainous visage of the Twisted Mouth. A knife in his hand was stained red to the hilt with the life-blood of the door guard whom they had caught unawares. Behind the pair the window was open and the upper rungs of a ladder showed above the sill.
Fate was upon him. The Emperor knew that, and in that crucial moment when his life seemed worth but a farthing, the noble bearing of his forbears came suddenly to him, straightening the bowed shoulders, throwing back the bent head and putting the truly regal blaze of eleven generations of Hapsburgs into his watery eyes.
“Dogs! what do you here in our presence unannounced?” Franz Joseph thundered, and even the pajamas covering his wasted form did not detract from the impressiveness of his mien. “Begone!”
The Emperor pointed one long forefinger from the wretches to the door.