Elizabeth had not been trained for any great position. She was only sixteen: a madcap and a child of nature—accustomed, in so far as anyone in her station might be, to the untrammelled freedom of a highlander. She roamed the woods and the mountains—though not, as the author of “The Martyrdom of an Empress” tells us, with a gun in her hand, in pursuit of game. There are stories of her playing the zither, at the doors of cottages in remote Bavarian valleys, while peasant children danced to the music; and she was strangely beautiful, with haunting eyes and a wonderful wealth of hair. Depths of meaning looked out of those eyes: indications of those mysteries of her soul through which she was presently to figure as an unfathomable conundrum challenging a curious world. Francis Joseph—tall, handsome, blond, blue-eyed, a proud soldier and a gallant man, with no mystery or semblance of a mystery about him—looked into the girl’s eyes, and was conquered.
Elizabeth was not formally presented—it was almost by accident that Francis Joseph first saw her. He was alone in a room when she entered, in a simple white dress, with flowers in her hair, and greeted him with a “Good morning, cousin.” He kept her talking—and, of course, as he was the Emperor, she could not possibly run away and leave him, however shy she felt—for quite a long time; and he ended by saying that he hoped to resume the conversation at dinner, or at the dance which was to follow. But Elizabeth feared not. She was still “in the schoolroom”—not yet “out”—had “nothing to wear.” “Still if your Majesty insists ...” she hesitated. “I do insist,” said Francis Joseph. “Listen! We’ll play a comedy. Say nothing to anyone, but dress for the party, and come down to it.” “But I shall be scolded.” “No, you won’t. I’ll see to that—you can trust me.”
So the comedy was played; and, of course, when the Emperor expressed his pleasure at seeing the unexpected guest, the scolding flickered out; and, after that, matters progressed at a great pace, to the great chagrin, as one cannot doubt, of Sister Helen. The Emperor outraged all the proprieties by dancing half the night with the school-girl. When the dance was interrupted for tea to be served, he showed her an album containing coloured illustrations of the various national costumes worn in the eighteen States of Austria. “There,” he said. “These are my subjects. I wonder if you would like them to be your subjects, too.” Then they danced again; and when the cotillon came, he presented his little Cinderella with a bouquet of edelweiss, gathered with his own hands, with the result that everyone except Cinderella herself began to suspect that his intentions were serious.
His Cinderella, indeed, could hardly believe that his intentions were serious, even when her mother told her so. “What! Me an Empress! But I am nobody!” she exclaimed sceptically; but she had not long to wait before the sense of her importance was brought home to her, for at ten o’clock the next morning, Francis Joseph’s carriage rattled up to the door of her hotel. “Is the Princess Elizabeth up?” he asked; and the reply was that Princess Elizabeth had not finished dressing. “Then I will see the Duchess,” he said; and he went up and made his formal demand for his Cinderella’s hand, with the result that, half an hour later, all the members of the Imperial family then in Ischl were summoned to the little parish church, and there, to the strains of the Austrian national anthem, the betrothal was solemnly celebrated. His words to his affianced bride, as he came out of the church, are said to have been:—
“This is the happiest day of my life. I owe my happiness to you, and I thank you for the light which you have brought into my life.”
It was very sad, of course, for Sister Helen, who afterwards sought consolation—but perhaps failed to find it—by marrying the Prince of Thurn and Taxis. It was not altogether satisfactory to Duke Maximilian, who raised such objections as Laban raised when Jacob proposed to marry Rachel and leave Leah a spinster. It did not altogether please the Archduchess Sophia, who was a masterful woman, and would rather have got her own way than see her son insist successfully upon his. But it was a love match; and that, after all, is the main thing in royal as in other marriages. There was no need for the Court and Society journalists to rack their brains for reasons for describing the union as “romantic.” It was romantic on the face of it—as romantic as anything in any fairy-tale.
And yet——
And yet, as it proved, things were not exactly what they seemed to be; and that marriage, so romantically contrived and concluded, was to be the starting-point of tragedies; the beginning—if one is superstitious and takes that view of things—of the fulfilment of Countess Karolyi’s curse.
CHAPTER VIII
The failure of the marriage—Difficulty of explaining it—The two conflicting personalities—Francis Joseph’s personality obvious—The Empress Elizabeth’s personality mysterious—Her sympathy with the Hungarians, and its political importance—Her confession of melancholy.