Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Her eyes during this long reverie, interrupted only by an entr’acte, were fixed upon the stage. The surface of her brain had taken its impression of the interior of the monastery where the starving mountebank, cursed by the prior for his blasphemy, had been enticed that he might find absolution in the life of a monk and fill his stomach daily. The priests and friars in their rich white cassocks, the brown interior of the monastic room, made a harmonious and insidious picture, and the despair of the miserable youth while the other cenobites boasted of the arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, music—with which they glorified the Virgin, drew tears from many sympathetic eyes.

The juggler and a kindly friar were alone, and the elect was pouring into the astonished ear of the poor ignoramus the story of the birth of Christ in a manger, and explaining that the Lady of Sorrows understood not only Latin, but all languages, and even dialects, and had as merciful an ear for the outcast as for the king. The mountebank, with his primitive credulity, his almost maniacal terror under the curse of the abbot, is a vivid study of superstition in the Middle Ages. As Ranata’s attention was captured for the moment by the intensity of the final moments of the act, she found herself envying the simplicity of a creature as capable, in his primal limitations, of the extremest satisfaction and happiness as of terror and despair. The second entr’acte is very short. A few moments after the curtain rises the impressive double row of friars in their sumptuous cassocks march out of the chapel to their own solemn music, and the mountebank enters alone, throws off his monastic robe, and in his costume of a harlequin offers his juggler’s art to the glorification of the painted Virgin above the altar. It is a scene almost incredible in its childish superstition, but so pathetic that in that rapt audience neither Jew nor Protestant paid his brain the tribute of a smile. Ranata, of all persons, saw no humor in it, for her mind traversed the history of her race, and halted suddenly at the memory of Maria Theresia, who had sent her daughters down alone into the imperial crypt on the eve of their marriage to pray among the coffins of their ancestors. She recalled how she herself had sometimes felt an impulse to go down there in the night and do likewise, that she might satisfy that something in the depths of her soul so akin to those who had dwelt in the benighted past.

Her attitude suddenly lost its graceful ease. She stiffened and sat erect as if about to spring; but the eye of the house was focussed on the stage and she was forgotten. Was not the time come for that nocturnal pilgrimage? Might not she there, among those four centuries of her dead, steep herself in that subtle aura of personality which still must diffuse itself through lead and bronze? Alone there, at midnight, with but the light of a taper to illumine those motley hillocks, with the dank odor of death clogging her senses, kneeling close to the dust and the corruption which had lived so intensely with the blood that ran in her own veins, must she not recapture her inherited superstitions, break with the present, absorb once more the poison of the past? She realized that it was not to satisfy her sense of kinship with the dead that she should now go to them alone at midnight, but to revive the lost sense of indissoluble relationship, of similarities, of the closest likeness of which inherited blood and brain-cells are capable. She should kneel finally at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin, and pray there until she was a Hapsburg once more.

Heavy and abnormal as her brain was from fatigue, sleeplessness, passionate misery of thought, and reaction from the exalted mood of her last interview with Fessenden, still it seemed to her that it drew away in modern disgust from the idea that had risen precipitately in its middle and taken possession. But Ranata clung to that idea as to her one hope of salvation; and as the Virgin and the angels, which had appeared in place of the picture above the altar, to reveal the eternal beauty of simple faith to the indignant priests, were growing more luminous, and at the same time, so perfect the art, less and less material, and the poor juggler’s spirit was struggling from its flesh, she matured the details of her plan; and half an hour later, when she descended from the carriage in the palace court-yard, she asked Sarolta to be ready to accompany her to Vienna on the following day.

XXVIII

Fessenden had found his telegrams awaiting him, and started at once for Berlin. While the ghosts in Ranata were chuckling their recognition to the painted superstitions of the stage, he was in the royal palace, in the comfortable English-looking study overlooking the Schlossplatz. On the north corner of the huge brown pile floated the purple banner which informs the people of Berlin that their “Travelling Kaiser” is visiting at home.

The Emperor was pleasurably at home this evening, for, although he was too much of a soldier to lounge, he wore a smoking-jacket and sat deep in one of his English chairs; the color of animation was in his pale face, and his eyes, always expressive and brilliant, sparkled with a more personal emotion.

It was night. His courtiers, his ministers, his generals, his supplicants, were on the other side of the door, and he could be wholly himself for an hour with the one man who neither feared nor flattered him, to whom he had given a large portion of his own warm affections, and who, in return, gave him the sincerest friendship he would ever know.

Fessenden’s chair was drawn close to the fire, and he was sipping a Scotch-and-soda. It was a night for a comfortable talk in a warm bright room, surrounded by books and a man’s more intimate belongings; for the wind howled about the corner of the palace and dashed the rain against the glass. Fessenden’s eyes were sparkling also, but with excitement, and he was more nervous than he usually permitted his manner to betray.

“Within a week,” the Emperor was saying, “the Archduchess will be summoned to Vienna on one pretence or another. The plan is to make her a prisoner in her own rooms until she promises to marry the Archduke Aloys Franz. I suggested him on account of his commanding qualities as a disciplinarian; you will recall that they married the Princess Marie Stefanie to him when her liaison with her tenor was discovered. He imprisoned her on one of his estates, never permitted her to leave it for a day, and when she lost a front tooth mortified her vanity by refusing her the services of a dentist—she was a beauty, poor little thing! As a husband for refractory princesses he is without a peer; and my indirect suggestion met with instant favor from the Emperor, who is distracted between the jealousies of the court and the new motive for disturbance in the caldron of Hungary. The full information—furnished by the maid of honor and other spies—of her love for you was the last straw; and much as the Emperor loves peace and quiet, when the moment comes to act he acts. The Archduchess, of course, will not marry Aloys Franz. We know her; elaboration of that statement is superfluous. But several weeks of solitary meditation will probably convince her that, as her ambitions are thwarted, she may as well marry you and be happy. Confinement will reduce her to an abnormal state, where love will seem the only object for living.”