Slowly the great door of the Cathedral opened. Behind it there was revealed an impressive group. Ceremonially they advanced to the top of the steps. There were probably twenty soldiers first. They turned, and spread out fanwise. Then came four officers in brilliant uniforms, to stand in front of the soldiers, their gold braid shining. Next came nine men in sober black, their ages and figures widely varied. They took their places in front of the officers. Then came the Queen Mother, draped theatrically, and becomingly, in black crepe, leaning on the arm of another man in black. She walked to the very edge of the steps and stood there in an attitude so simple as to suggest a pose. A cheer started in several parts of the square at once, but before it gained any volume it died out again in little ripples of surprise and chatter. The red-bearded man beside us was talking so hard in Alarian with a dozen people at once that he could not answer our questions. A slender girl in white and a tall thin man in black were coming through the Cathedral doorway. I was reasonably certain they were the two who had rushed past us in their cars when we first came into the square. No wonder they had been in a hurry. The man, obviously, was Prince Conrad, but I wondered who the girl in white could be. She was in an important position on the platform, yet I could not remember that there was any woman in the Royal Family of Alaria except the Queen Mother. I wondered if Bela could have married secretly one of the many girls whose pictures had been in the papers with his.
The crowd began to cheer in earnest at the sight of Conrad, and in staccato counterpoint rose also flashes of disapproval, and some of the people were merely silent. I held my breath. This wasn’t my country, it was all a lot of hocus-pocus, and the government of Alaria was nothing to me anyway, but I was thrilled for all that. I couldn’t help myself, and John was like a child with a toy.
“The King! The King! King Conrad!” shouted our red-bearded man.
“Who is the girl in white?” John asked him for the dozenth time, and at last he answered. “No one knows,” he said, “I never saw her before. Perhaps Conrad will soon be married. They will tell us presently.”
Conrad held up his hand for silence, and the Queen Mother, whose head had been bowed in her grief, raised it in a triumphant gesture, as though instead of having reached the end of a long reign at the death of her son, she had just begun a new one. It was the gesture of a woman of courage. She had always had that, certainly. Queen Yolanda of Alaria had made her name the symbol of the successful and beautiful, but domineering and unpopular, woman, full of energy and even of genius. I was suddenly sorry for Yolanda. For years she had been lending her Royal name to every project that offered her money—especially in America. No doubt she shared the usual European view that America was so far beyond the limits of the known world that what she might authorise on that broad continent did not matter. She had written for the magazines, endorsed cigarettes, extended her illustrious hospitality to wealthy but otherwise socially dubious persons. Alaria had benefitted by her scheming. So, no doubt, had she. The country had for years been too poor to afford hospitals or other public improvements. It had also been too poor to afford her the array and the surroundings suitable to a queen. What she wanted she had acquired by the means she found possible. But she had reached the end of her road. Even her ingenuity would not be able to find a way out of giving up the crown of her adopted country to Conrad, and he had opposed her openly for years.
And then Conrad began to speak. The crowd listened with interest. Our guide translated for us in a whisper, very quickly and roughly. The first part of his speech was a eulogy of King Bela. There wasn’t much to be said in praise of that young man, but what there was Conrad said. From Bela he turned to praise Yolanda for her energy, her enterprise, her cleverness in the face of all obstacles and difficulties. Then he spoke of Bela’s father, and what a happy family they had been until that terrible day of the assassination. He described the dreadful moment when the bomb had burst, and the drive back to the Palace, the mother weeping tragically over her children and her dead husband. The scene in the Palace when the royal physician had declared the King and his elder son dead. The little Princess Maria Lalena was yet alive. The mother’s misery because of the child’s wounds, her prayers for her life.
All that was known to the crowd. They listened politely, even interestedly, but little murmurs of impatience began to float about that he should tell again a tale so old and so well known, and having so little to do with his own accession to the throne. But still he spoke on, and suddenly he said something that brought gasps from the crowd. Our interpreter forgot us again until John pulled at his arm. Conrad then was ushering forward the girl in white, the soldiers presented arms at the gesture. The girl bowed, her hands crossed on her breast, like a picture of some early Christian martyr. The red-beard’s eyes were wide with amazement, “The Princess!” he cried, “The dead Princess! It is she! Viva Maria Lalena! Viva, viva! The Queen! She is the Queen!”
John was almost as excited as the man himself, “That girl in white?” he demanded.
“Yes, yes, the one in white, who else? They will hold the coronation festivities in two weeks’ time. We have not had a reigning queen since the days of good Queen Anna, two hundred years ago. She will be another Queen Anna, and we will all be prosperous and happy as our ancestors were in the days of Queen Anna! Viva! Viva!” and he threw his hat in the air and caught it again, to show his approval.
But in other parts of the crowd there was less enthusiasm. One woman in a red shawl was hissing through strong white teeth, her brown face alight with venom. The crowd surged forward toward the steps. If the new slim Queen had been there alone they might have done her some harm, but Yolanda stood on one side of her, and Conrad on the other, and each of them looked quite capable of holding any mere crowd at bay.