She had spoken flippantly, quite brutally, but she finished with an accent of profound sadness.
“You will become morbid if you are not careful,” said Miss Abbott seriously. “Only the deliberately cultivated reasonableness with which you have accepted this deadly—and ridiculous—life of yours, and the superhuman control you have acquired over your natural impatience and impulsiveness, have saved you so far. But thirty is a dangerous age. I am beginning to feel it myself—wasted emotions, opportunities, passing youth—all that sort of thing. You, my dear, grow more beautiful every day, and your beauty has done you so little good! Gasps and murmurs as you trail down between the tapestries of the Great Hall of Ceremonies in the most gorgeous white gowns ever seen, or ride once a year or so in the Prater!” She paused a moment, and then added deliberately: “Why not cut it? It is incongruous and monstrous to see the most intelligent women in Europe cramped in a three-by-six cage like one of Louis XI.’s victims. What keeps you? Nothing but the silliest superstition in the world to-day, drivelling out its precarious existence. You have your own money. My father can double and treble it. My step-mother would preserve you from all scandal. You could exercise your gifts and have a career, or marry and be happy. Come along—don’t be an idiot.”
“There is just one thing you never can understand. I know you think we are fatuous, if not mad, to believe ourselves heaven-born, divinely appointed; but here we are, we have our inherited duties, and here we must remain. Ourselves are the last we are permitted to consider from our coming to our going. We come into this world with a birthright of obligations to millions of people whose ancestors permitted us first to mount the throne—in our case eight centuries ago! We Hapsburgs have been threatened with annihilation, we have lost much that was precious, the German Empire overshadows and threatens us, and God knows what will happen when my father dies. But although our star has often turned black, it has never gone out. It has a way of flashing up from its embers and disconcerting Europe that suggests eternal fires—if they are carefully watched. And it is the hearth fires that need watching. William’s ambitions will come to nothing if our people stand firm. I have no illusion regarding the real danger. So long as my father lives we are safe against the worst that revolutionists can do. But Rudolf is dead! Both Austria and Hungary detest the Heir, that cold bigot, who has never a smile for the people. And court life will cease when he comes to the throne, for it is not likely he will divorce that woman and marry a princess. Only the most watchful care can save us. The Hungarians are straining at the bit all the time, and the moment disintegration begins William will find some pretext to march in. He will lose no more time than Frederick lost when he saw a woman ascend a tottering throne. Although I am permitted to take no part in politics, I still have a rôle to play which is of almost as much importance to my country as my father’s. One of my obligations is to make the world believe that a princess is above ordinary temptations and weaknesses—a tradition which the Hapsburgs have done more than any royal house to obliterate—and that makes my personal duty the more obvious. Another thing, as you know—to the world I am not even the individual. During these last ten years my study has been to persuade my father’s people that I am the conventional, safely stupid, and normal princess, to make them forget my mother’s supposed gift to this House. If I should do what you propose, Austria would either assume that I was as mad as Ludvig and Otto, or, were they convinced that I had a better brain than my sort, they would accept my act as a deliberate insult to the monarchical idea. In either case I should loosen one more stone in these rotting foundations of ours. Marriage out of class, elopement, a whispered intrigue—they are accustomed to all! But a deliberate renunciation, based on non-sentimental grounds, a flight to America—that would be the new thing with a vengeance, and it is only the innovation that tells. Oh, if Rudolf had lived. If Rudolf—Rudolf—”
She pushed back her chair violently, banished the seriousness from her face.
“Enough of this infliction. I have opened the safety-valves and feel better. Come, show me your new frocks. Are they finer than mine? What have you brought me from New York? And the bonbons! the bonbons! Do you know where we go two weeks from to-day? To Hungary, for the autumn manœuvres. I am so glad! I have not been to Budapest since I was a child. I long to go. I love Hungary. It dares to rebel, and sometimes it gets what it wants. And our dear cousin Willy is to be our guest. He’s bound to come with a sensation up his sleeve. Sometimes I regret that I was not old enough to marry him, for although I fear and sometimes hate him, life with him might have been interesting, for he at least is a man.”
II
When Alexandra was twelve years old Mrs. Abbott had taken her to Vienna to consult a famous surgeon for a threatened deformity. He had commanded that the child be left under his care for at least five years, and Mrs. Abbott, whose devotion to her husband amounted to a mannerism, left her with an old friend, a Hungarian, whose infinite quarterings made her one of that small band so closely allied with the court that they have never learned to snub, since nobody has ever dared to take a liberty with them. This lady, who had married one of the Princes Windischgrätz had formed a friendship with Mrs. Abbott in her impulsive youth when the American’s father had been minister to Austria, renewing it when she returned as the wife of a secretary of Legation. The young husband had died in Vienna, and the Princess had shown a sincere and spontaneous sympathy which cemented their friendship into an intimacy where each might dare to accept a favor from the other. She also extravagantly admired the American’s toilettes, having a natural and exquisite taste, and rebelling at the frequent necessity to wear an old gown, soiled and frayed, perhaps, under her load of family jewels. After her friend married the chieftain of millions, she visited her in New York and Newport, and was deeply impressed with a style of living far more comfortable and luxurious than anything in Europe, and quite as magnificent. Immobile to a world whose existence she barely admitted, with her own class she was simple and natural; and Mrs. Abbott having acquired the same tactics in an early experience of European courts, there was no marked external difference between these two exalted dames, and much in common. The friendship never waned, for Mrs. Abbott was frequently in Europe, and was the first American to dress in Vienna; when, therefore, she was for once in a way confronted with a serious problem, the Princess came gallantly to the rescue, and Alexandra for three years lived in a palace immense and chilly, but as full of old furniture and pictures as a museum, and often of gay Hungarian relatives who played high and slept late.
The “Princess Sarolta,” as she was known to the elect, was a woman of much heart and cynicism, of strong loves and stronger hates. Without children of her own, one of the deepest affections of her life had been for the Archduke Rudolf. Her pet aversion had been the Empress, whom she denounced as a mixture of the country girl and the mystic, wholly unfit to wear a crown. She never forgave her for being, not von Bayern, but in Bayern; and when, in addition to the comparative insignificance of her birth, the sweet and gentle but shy and unhappy Empress treated a throne with contumely and sought the consolations of the inner life, the Princess became her most contemptuous enemy.
To Ranata the Princess transferred the affection she had given to Rudolf, although it was unmixed with the enthusiasm inspired by the brilliant if reckless hope of a house to which she was loyally devoted. When Alexandra was left on her hands Rudolf was still alive, but she was much interested in the rebellious little Archduchess, who in looks and temperament was unlike her mother or any of the recent Hapsburg women; and partly out of sympathy, partly because it pleased her to do one original thing in her life, she brought the two children together on all their holidays.
They promptly gave to each other their hoarded stores of affection. Alexandra, lively, fearless, without awe of rank, yet with too much inherited and inculcated taste to take the wrong sort of liberty with the humblest of her friends, seemed in the nature of a divine gift to a princess who was never permitted to forget her rank by the children of the court circle. These little girls came, when invited, with phrases and sentiments carefully drilled, their small minds already agitated by the possibility of future favors. They bored and exasperated their intelligent, if imperious and highly strung, hostess; the more so that her courtesy must be unwavering, lest she remind them of their inferiority in rank. But Alexandra slapped her when she was angry, and hugged her when the tide of her young and ardent affections rose, indulged in ribald merriment at the rigid Spanish etiquette of the court, the chill magnificence of the ceremonial rooms, of the army of splendid guards and chamberlains and lackeys, and the many other inconsistencies with the daily democracy of the court-yards and the general external dinginess and internal discomfort of the wealthiest house in Europe. But to the Emperor she accorded an unwavering respect, and she always amused him. When, after the terrible loss of his only son—a tragedy which practically banished his wife from his homes—Ranata was first ill, then melancholy, clinging to her chosen friend day and night, he had given his indifferent consent to the American remaining in the Hofburg until his daughter could live without her. That time had not yet arrived, and although the incongruity of an American inmate of the Hofburg sometimes entered the carefully occupied brain of a monarch whose traditions would not permit him to receive the bourgeoise wife of the greatest of his subjects, and bade him ignore the distinguished in art and letters, yet was he so grateful for any cause that might lessen the problem of his youngest born that he deferred indefinitely a half-cherished protest. He believed Alexandra’s influence to be wholesome, and he dreaded the scene which he knew must follow any attempt to reduce the friendship to a more formal footing; Ranata had pounded shrieking on his door more than once.