The resolute opposition which Elizabeth now met with from her, who had, hitherto, appeared like a drooping lilly, yielding unresistingly to the heavy shower that bowed her to the earth, amazed and perplexed her. As Charles had been careful to conceal his daughter's interviews with the Prince of Lorraine, and Francis did not come to Vienna; the Empress could trace no cause for this extraordinary change: and when she talked to her husband, of Maria Theresa's stubborn refractoriness, he coldly replied—
"The Marquis de Montemar has been admitted too familiarly to her presence. He is, as seeming fair, as his father: he may be equally false." Surprised at this unexpected, and, she was sure, unprovoked aspersion on the Duke, the Empress cautiously took up the defence of his unswerving truth.
"He is unworthy your confidence;" replied the Emperor, "for, after all his affected hostility to Wharton, as the instigator of every vexatious act from the Bavarian conspiracy, I have discovered from unquestionable evidence, that he has secret intelligence with him. On what subjects, ambition, boundless and wild as his own, can alone guess. Look to his son, Elizabeth, and to our daughter."
Charles would not explain farther, and left the Empress in encreased perplexity.
In vain she interrogated her daughter; in vain she insisted on her union with Don Carlos: she was resolute in not answering a word to any of the charges her mother put to her, as the reason for her refusal. When the Empress was angry, Maria Theresa remained sullenly firm; when her mother was tender and imploring, the hapless Princess wept in silence, but would not yield.
One morning Elizabeth entered her daughter's apartment, with a determination not to leave it, until she had brought her to the point, whence, she was resolved there should be no escape. She spoke, persuaded, threatened, implored; but the Princess was more obstinate than ever; though, so agitated by her mother's language, that she fell back in hysterical emotion into her chair. The violence of her disorder discomposed her dress, and the vest of her robe bursting open, the eye of her mother caught the glitter of something like the setting of a picture. With an immediate impulse she snatched it from the bosom of her daughter; and beheld, what she believed, the portrait of de Montemar.
Her eyes, for a moment, fixed themselves with a horrid conviction of a wide and nameless treachery. She looked from the picture to her daughter, with a frightful glare, in their before mild aspect. Maria Theresa, alarmed out of her hysterics, had sprung from her seat, and stood before her mother, with her hands clasped, in speechless supplication.
"And when did he give you this?" demanded Elizabeth, in a hollow, and almost suffocated voice.
The Princess dropped, trembling on her knees, without power of utterance; for, not aware of her mother's mistake, she thought the discovery of the Prince's picture in her breast, had betrayed the secret of her father: and, on its preservation, he had taught her to believe, entirely depended her future happiness.
"Theresa, I command you, to confess to me, the whole of de Montemar's treachery. When did he dare to give you this?—and—unhappy, degenerate girl! how did you dare to give the encouragement, to warrant such treasonable presumption?"