The blow, however—whatever he knew or did not know—was bound, in any case to be a terrible one to Francis Joseph. When Count Hoyos drove up in a sleigh in the early morning with the news, he broke down and sobbed. Then he mastered himself, and gave the necessary orders, and presently issued this proclamation to his people:—
“Deeply moved by a sorrow too profound for words, I humbly bow before the inscrutable decrees of a Providence which has chosen to afflict myself and my people, and I pray to Almighty God to grant to us all the courage to bear the load of our irreparable loss.”
And to his Hungarian Prime Minister Tisza, he wrote:—
“I have lost everything. I had placed my hope and my faith in my son. There remains to me now nothing but the sentiment of duty, to which I hope to remain faithful as long as my aged bones support me.”
He must have thought, indeed, at that hour, that the cup of his sorrows was full, and that the curse at last had done with him. But it was not so. In spite of that devotion to duty to which he had pledged himself, calamity after calamity was still to be heaped upon his head. Our story of the Tragedy of Meyerling has to be followed by the story of the tragic disappearance of John Orth.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Archduke John Salvator—His many accomplishments—His criticisms of his superiors—His disgrace at Court—His love affair with an English lady—“Your darling Archduckling”—His proposal to abandon his rank and earn his living as a teacher of languages—His love affair with Milly Stübel—He quarrels with Francis Joseph, takes the name of John Orth, and leaves Austria.
“John Orth,” as we shall have to call him, was the Archduke John Salvator: the brother of the Grand Duke of Tuscany—the uncle of the Archduke who was to become “Herr Wulfling,” and of the Princess who was to marry Signor Toselli. This is the branch of the House of Habsburg which has been most conspicuous in its revolt against the Habsburg traditions; and the Archduke John Salvator’s place among them is that of the first of the family rebels. He was not only a rebel in love; he also caused trouble, and got into trouble, as soldier and politician.
He was a man of many accomplishments: one who “fancied himself,” not only as a soldier, and a sailor, and a pamphleteer, but also as a musical composer. He composed a waltz, which enjoyed a great vogue, not only in Vienna; and then, suspecting that its popularity might be due to his rank, he decided to compose something more ambitious, and produce it anonymously. The great work was a ballet—Les Assassins—which was duly staged at the Vienna Opera as the production of a new and unknown man. Its anonymity would not have impaired its prospects if the Vienna Opera had had a Press agent who knew his business as the modern Press agents know theirs. Dark hints, mysteriously whispered, would then have stimulated the curiosity of the public and invited the applause of the connoisseurs and leaders of opinion. But the Press agents did not know their business—perhaps there were no Press agents in those days; and the ballet itself, though pretty good for an Archduke, did not come up to the standard of professional musicians. Its reception was chilly, and its run was short; so the Archduke John Salvator turned his activity into other channels.
While little more than a boy he became a military critic and a political agitator, publishing his first pamphlet on the organisation of the Austrian army when he was no more than twenty-one. The gist of his remarks was that the Austrian military system had got into a rut, and that the Austrian artillery was defective. Incidentally, too, he criticised the conduct of the Austrian Foreign Office; and the Foreign Minister made representations, with the result that the Archduke was sent to Cracow, to be out of the way. In his exile, however, he wrote more pamphlets, setting forth that the frontier fortifications were valueless, and that the War Minister did not know his business. He also lectured at the Military Club on the Austrian system of military education, which he declared to be wooden, and to deprive the soldiers of all initiative and resource. That lecture was a veiled attack upon the Archduke Albert, the victor of Custozza; so the Archduke John Salvator was once more politely exiled—this time to a command at Linz.