He entertained her with several of his adventures and exploits in South America, but dropped the subject to tell her something of his problem in mechanics and electricity.
“If anything was needed when I awoke at noon to-day to make me feel as if I owned the entire universe,” he said, “it was a letter from my chief electrician which convinced me for the first time that he was on the verge of perfecting this old dream of mine. My father was to go out as soon as telegraphed for and witness the practical demonstration. Then, indeed, I practically will hold the fate of the world in the hollow of my hand.”
Ranata stared hard at him, her pulse quickening. She had always envied him, and now he seemed to her to embody all the hopeful ambitions of all the world, a Titan whom only a new country with its utter disregard of failure could have produced. What order of men would his republics bring forth?
“But shall you never have a reverse, never fail?” she murmured. “There is a relentless law of compensation in Nature; surely you must have your blows, your bitterness, like other mortals.”
“I have already had enough trouble and anxiety, to say nothing of hideous privations, fatigue, and illness to satisfy Nature for the present. The only blow that could have reached my heart before this would have been the death of my father.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed sharply, “you do love me—I know how much! When this is over, will its memory mean as much to you as it will to me? Will the loss embitter, discourage you? It has seemed to me since last night that it will mean too much to me—that I shall need more courage than I possess to live on. With men—with you? How would it be, with your thousand occupations where I might not have one? Oh, at least help me to win this country! I fear no enemies—nothing else on earth.”
“All that,” said Fessenden, “is a subject which I positively refuse to discuss until these two months are up. All I wish you to be firmly convinced of from this moment—and you might repeat it nightly with your prayers lest you forget it—is that, under no possible circumstances short of death, shall I give you up, or relax for a moment in my determination to overcome every obstacle which either you or your father may raise. The sooner you recognize me as your destiny the better.”
XXII
When a woman is groping about among the mysteries of her great passion she has little to give the world, and, all the forces of her being consuming her inwardly, her magnetism is diminished. With the average woman this matters little—she merely bores her friends; but in the case of a princess, with but a season perhaps at her disposal within whose limits to preserve the map of Europe, or alter it to her liking, the untimely advent of love might blight her in the very plethora of her opportunities. Ranata realized this danger after a few days of complete indifference to anything but her own thoughts and the presence of Fessenden Abbott, discovered that she had fallen back into the niche of the unapproachable princess, from which only he could draw her. The moment she appreciated her condition she roused, when in public, the energies of her mind, wrenching it from her inner life. A career she was determined to have; and although she could not recall the enthusiasm of those first weeks in Hungary, her purpose was revitalized by the long shadows of bitterness and despair which the future cast back to her. True to her compact, she endeavored to eject that future from her imagination, and in greater part succeeded, for she had more wisdom than most women, and appreciated the priceless value of the immediate happiness. She was content, and in brief intervals intensely happy; her imagination was liberated and her power to feel superlative. The knowledge that both imagination and capacity for living must prove her scourge hereafter but made her cultivate both the more ardently while briefly mistress of her fate. And the concentrated ardor of which Fessenden was capable in the rare moments they found alone, contrasted with his average mood when he seemed to belong so wholly to himself, fascinated her far more than any constant evidence of her consuming influence over him would have done. Her own powerful individuality recognized the separateness of his, and was content to touch it in fugitive moments only. The archaic poem of eternal oneness made no appeal to her. Passionate love and loyal friendship she had to offer in the fullest equipment granted to mortals, but the development of her own individuality in its incorruptible silences must go on forever, submerged only by the primal tides; and so her instincts and her endowment saved her from the pursuit of that will-o’-the-wisp which most women follow until it hides in the grave. She saw that Fessenden recognized in her this disunion of temperament and personality, for although his were the masculine limitations which deprived him of the comprehensions women think they want, the needs of his own soul were too great for blindness to another that had come so close.
Therefore, Ranata, although she loved her hours of solitude the more, and even grudged her brain its sleep, reopened her windows to the world before it was too late. She entertained frequently, and many of the magnates gave superb entertainments in her honor. Fessenden, Zrinyi, and several other young enthusiasts, arranged an illuminated fête on the Danube, and for a few moments she believed herself to be a fairy princess on a fairy planet. Every house, great and small, on the hills of Buda, burned its colored lights, and the bridges, the islands, the boats, looked as if on fire with the souls of stars and flowers. The fireworks among the ruins of the castle on the height completed a scene of illusion possible in only three or four cities of the world.