Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

In the course of an hour the path came abruptly to an end on the shore of a small lake, from three sides of which the mountains rose like the straight and jealous sides of a mighty jewel casket guarding the diamond treasure of some old god of the hills. The lake, looking smaller perhaps from the great height of the perpendicular mountains surrounding it, was oval in shape, and its frozen surface glittered and sparkled under the moon poised directly above. No light of man had ever drawn such radiance from the diamond. The air was so still that the cold was hardly noticeable. The silence was intense, oppressive, now that their feet no longer met the snow crisply. Ranata put her hand nervously to her head.

“What are you thinking of?” she asked.

“Of my boyhood in the Adirondacks. To-night a thousand years seem to have disappeared since then. And many and wild as were my dreams of the future in those callow days when I had leisure for dreams, no flight penetrated to the future which held these last weeks, to the indescribable solitude of this night with you. In those days I fancied myself a poor boy who had begun life in the orthodox log-cabin and must end in the White House. But that I should love a daughter of the Cæsars and hold her in my arms among the eternal snows of the loneliest of the Alps never muttered in my most exalted moments. Life is a rum thing.”

Ranata laughed in spite of the chaotic emotions that had driven her forth. “Which do you really love best, I wonder, the sublime or the ridiculous? Do you know what I had almost made up my mind to do when I came down to dinner?”

“To go to-morrow with me to Fiume?”

“To-night; as soon as the others were out of the way, and Zrinyi could have the horses harnessed. After I left you there was an hour in which I think I really was mad. Every fact of existence except the possibility of being alone with you on your yacht seemed to have been burned out of my mind. I would have sold Austria to William, I would have flung Hungary to Roumania—there was no crime I would not have committed to have been alone on this earth with you. And now we are alone, and the fever is gone. I look back upon the hours before those poor creatures came and shouted Rudolf’s name as upon some half-remembered interval of insanity. But it was appallingly real then, and if it came once it may come again. After our return to Budapest—and I shall start to-morrow—I shall never see you again.”

“I still think you are unwise not to take advantage of this opportunity. You will regret it; take my word for that.”

“Doubtless, when it is happily too late. I am ice now. I can only describe my sensation while those wild men were begging me for Rudolf by asking you to imagine yourself standing under that frozen cascade over there. It seemed to me that for the first time I realized the enormity of his crime. He could have been a great monarch, he could have preserved his country, he could have saved Europe from unimaginable horrors; and every gift, every duty, every ambition disappeared into the flaming abyss of his passions. Oh, if my father could only have died twenty years ago! That alone could have saved Rudolf, for it was excess that killed him; the occasional indulgence would not have mattered. And these men, and thousands like them, would have obeyed his lightest call to save Austria from Europe, to save it from Hungary if need be. They would come at my call. They would laugh even at my father. And, Fessenden, above those wild heads, and bodies like mountain beasts, I saw for a moment the pale face of Rudolf, terrible with agony and remorse, with impotent resentment against the law of the grave, dumbly beseeching me to continue the work that the great invisible forces up there had sent him into the world to accomplish. It was then that my blood turned to ice. An hour before—and in other moments, perhaps—I had been capable of greater guilt than Rudolf’s; for after all I have had no such temptations, no such provocations as his. Where you have upheld me, women, from the time he was old enough, the very girls of the court, flung themselves beneath his feet, honored to be dishonored by the heir to the throne, even had he been less fascinating as a man. My father had made no secret of his own amours; there has been no more corrupt court in Europe; Rudolf saw no necessity for restraint, and he used none. If he had married happily all might have been well, for he was not vicious, and his nature was very affectionate. But when does royalty marry happily? Fortunate the prince who marries the cow. Then at least there is one incentive the less. Rudolf had no such fortune, and disappointment and ennui, multiplying themselves, drove him to the arms of charming women who wished for nothing so much as to make him forget, and from them to the boon companions who adored him, but dared not remonstrate had they wished, when he drank till morning. But what excuse had I? Only that of a passion so great and so real that it should give me the strength of these mountains. Without it, after gaining my wishes in Hungary, I might have become bored, indifferent, cynical; I might even, as I felt youth passing, have indulged in amours that no one would dare to take me to account for. I might have gone to my coffin there in the Kaisergruft without an ideal in my soul, disillusioned, all my original nature in ruins, reviling life, glad to die. Now it seems to me that after the inevitable agony is over, I have it in me to become really great in character, sustained by an inner life and fed by a memory that will keep me young till my death. I thought of this long ago, when I met you first, but it passed from my mind. It was more like a dream then. I know it to be a reality now. I doubt if there can be any such actual happiness as what I shall find in the memories of you.”

Fessenden looked at her long and intently. If she was of many and variable moods, the moods were of an intensity and truth which submerged the other women in her while they lasted. And he always responded to her deeper moments so fully and so involuntarily that only his ever-alert brain saved him from compromising his future conduct. As in the profoundest solitude he had ever known, he looked through her eyes into her naked soul, he had a long moment of doubt. In that cold ideal of fulfilled duty, with her love apotheosized and spiritualized, might she not in truth be happier than he could make her? Her state, and the more commonplace cause of the deep chill of an Alpine midnight, had cooled his own blood, and muffled the passionate voices in his imagination. For a moment he too felt the white intoxication of the ideal of a lifetime of self-immolation on the passionless shores of duty, forecasted the serenity with which Nature rewards perpetual striving after spiritual heights, and compensates for the voluntary resignation of the joy of love. He darted a glance upward and was visited by a brief illusion: he and Ranata stood alone on the highest peak that pierced the stars. Then like Life he compromised.

“I wish for nothing less than your full and unconditional surrender,” he said. “If, when you have had time to know yourself better than you do now, you tell me that your decision is unalterable, I will persist no further. I believe that you will send for me before long, but I may be mistaken. Perhaps I have been blinded by my love, and the hopes with which it has inspired my imagination. There may be, there are, of course, depths in your mind of which I have no conception. These may contain forces that will finally shut me out of your life. If you convince me that I should add to your unhappiness by persisting, or that I should do you a great wrong by making you mine in spite of yourself, then I promise you here solemnly to withdraw finally from your life; and to be as eternally faithful to you as I believe you will be to me.”