Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

The days passed and the lover gave no sign that he was as distraught as the prisoner. There are times in life when one lives very fast. The first forty-eight hours of her imprisonment consumed the mental energies of months. As the first excitement decreased, and with it something of the novelty of her situation, her mind was free again for thoughts and dreams she had been half glad to forget, so many were the pangs they had held. And in the train of love came all the doubts and tragic conceptions with which a woman cursed with imagination never fails to torment herself. The women for whom men would most willingly die—if there be yet that spirit abroad in the world—women who in the end are most sure to discard the still ardent lover, often suffer in their imaginary tragedies as intensely as their more constant and less valued sisters in their hopeless realities. Ranata was not the woman to love and tire, but her imagination was the least controlled of her faculties. She descended into the very depths of depression and convinced herself that Fessenden Abbott had taken her at her word and returned to America before any one had suspected her imprisonment and sent him warning. (The faithful maid had not dared to confess her eavesdropping.) She might be confined here until she lost her reason, and he would drown his thoughts of her in the hideous details of business, or in those great schemes of his, remembering her only as a purified spirit; likely enough, wearying of the cold picture. She forgot her ideals, even her instinctive knowledge of him, and treated his vows with cynicism. What man in this practical modern world—and the world was practical and modern outside of the Hofburg—would be faithful to the woman hidden forever from his sight? He would marry, of course, and forget her; why, indeed, should he not? And what if he did? There were times when she hated him, when in the prolonged contemplation of his commonplace infidelity she despised him as unworthy of her, and hardened her heart until she doubted if it ever would melt again, even if he suddenly appeared and took her in his arms.

These crises in a woman’s brain are very unfortunate, and when men are wiser they will study to prevent them. After all, it is the psychical experience that tells, not the visible cause, and the scars may be deep and callous. In this case poor Fessenden was helpless, and Ranata had still felt and known so little that she had elasticity enough to survive several such crises without the worst effects; but if life had added bitterness to her store of experience she might have come out of her ordeal with her best prospect for happiness blasted.

Time cured this mood; but the passing of doubt and the restoration of the lover to favor helped her little to serenity. She recalled every look, the tones of his voice, every moment they had snatched together, all that he had taught her. She remembered every trick of speech and expression, the lighter but still personal habit they had fallen into of sitting apart for a few minutes after the tea-hour, while the others were drinking their coffee in one of the reception-rooms, at the opera and theatre, or riding to the Schwabenberg in the early morning. These had become established habits, and she regretted them almost as intensely as the more concentrated moments; she had known to the full the tantalizing sweetness of the intimate understanding in a crowd.

And she recalled all she knew of him through the stories he had told her of himself in the years before they had met. They revealed him in many phases, and she had often lingered on them when alone. But there was one that now seemed to be always in her brain, to rise vividly in the brief moments when she was not struggling with a passion of grief, of regret, above all striving to tear her mind from the uncertainty, the maddening inability to act.

It was a brief graphic story of an adventure in a mountain-pass in Venezuela, when with three or four men he had been set upon by half a score of the threatened dictator’s followers. The case had been desperate, there had been a few moments when he had never expected to see a wider sky again, and in those moments it was not so much he that had fought as Life itself. His pistol emptied, stabbed, shot, his clothing almost off his back, he was dragged to and fro on the rough mountain-road, hacking, struggling, hating, not a harking in him to his old love of the fight in that gasping tortured wrestle with Death himself; possessed only by the furious determination of Life to persist, to win against the enemy that never for an instant sleeps on its trail—so that the wonder is man lives a month from birth. At the end it had seemed to him that he saw the two ancient enemies at each other’s throats.

Fessenden’s face had been composed enough as he told the story, but her imagination had visioned it set and desperate, pictured the swollen chords of his neck, the muscles on his half-naked and bleeding body bulging with rage and resistance. His eye had glazed as Keene arrived and put the assassins to flight, and he had sunk into unconsciousness in bitterness and resentment, believing that he was dying. None of his stories of brilliant and reckless adventure had stirred her like this glimpse into his primeval depths, depths which in the lower types make for ruin, and when rarely in the ken of the great forces of soul and brain are chief among the main-springs of a man’s conquest over Life. The oftener this picture recurred to her, the face convulsed, or indomitable and grim, of the man she understood so well, the more was she persuaded that something had happened to still his energies, or he would have made her a sign before this. It had not needed that story to convince her that his courage would never fail him, but it now served the purpose of suggesting a similar strait where a wild revolt against death availed him nothing.

It needed only a shock to send the blood to her head and deliver her nerves from the control of her will, which had struggled hard to keep in office. The shock came, and Maria Leopoldina was the apologetic medium. She entered Ranata’s sitting-room on the sixth morning of the imprisonment with a newspaper, and pointed to a marked paragraph. The news item stated that the famous American, Herr Abbott, had sailed on his yacht from Trieste for New York on the previous day.

Then it was that the blood flew to Ranata’s head and stayed there. It disorganized her will, almost her powers of consecutive thought. A moment of forgetfulness and the tide of feeling, of terrified emotion, poured upward again, shaking her body and racking her nerves. She slept but a few hours at night, waking with a load of despair and terror in her brain. Her desperate efforts at self-control, her prayers for strength, were of no avail; for it must be remembered that mental suffering is a physical thing after all, psychical as may be the heights it is flung upon, and, until it has spent itself, as little to be controlled as a fever of the body. There was a constant effort in her throat to gasp, and moments of such utter and tumultuous despair that it seemed to her she saw straight into the soul of her brother during his last tormented moments. For it is in such depths of mental suffering, when the passions are in absolute control of the brain, and the victim if not mad might as well be, that life is taken. The strength in Ranata’s soul fought dumbly and persistently for mastery, and won in the end, but a weaker woman, with imagination and passions as strong, would have killed herself.

Finally she demanded of Maria Leopoldina—blissfully ignorant of the tragedies enacting within the hard exterior of her charge—a sleeping-potion; and the stewardess, when she returned with it, brought also the information that as a hasty marriage would undoubtedly cause a scandal exactly similar to that which had entertained Europe upon the informal exit into matrimony of the late wife of the Archduke Aloys Franz, it had been determined that the ceremony should not take place until two months hence. The official announcement of the engagement would be made presently, however, and until the day of the wedding she must remain in her rooms.

“Why, now that Mr. Abbott has gone?” asked Ranata. “Why deprive me of my liberty when I could make no use of it?”