He looked out of the window. Some of the pointed towers, visible from here, rose with an air of sombre romance against the sky, which was luminous with electricity. Below them, romantically, murmured the Danube. The mountains were like the landscape in a ballad. But no ballad, no romance echoed between their two hearts. The prose of the inevitable necessity was the only harmony that united them. But this harmony also united them in reality, brought them together, made them understand each other, feel and live at one with each other. They were now for a minute alone and their eyes frankly sought the depths of each other's souls. There was no need for pretence between these two: each saw the other's sorrow lying shivering and naked in the other's heart.
It was not the riotous passion of despair that they beheld. They saw a gentle, tremulous sadness; they looked at it with wide, staring eyes of anguish, as children look who think they see a ghost. For them that ghost issued from life itself: life itself became for them a ghostly existence. They themselves were spectres, though they know that they were tangible, with bodies. What were they?
Dream-beings, with crowns; they lived and bowed and acted and smiled as in a dream, because of their crowns. They did not exist: a vagueness did indeed suggest in their dream-brains that something might exist, in other laws of nature than those of their sphere, but in their sphere they did not exist....
His hand was toying mechanically with some papers that lay near him, on the mirror-bracket between two of the window-recesses; they were illustrated periodicals, doubtless left there by some chamberlain. He took one up, to while their sad silence, and opened it. The first thing that he saw was their own portraits:
"Look," he said.
He showed them to her. They now turned over the pages together, saw the portraits also of their parents, a drawing of the castle, a corner of Sigismundingen Park. Then together they read the announcement of their engagement. They were first each described separately: he, an accomplished prince, doing a great deal of good, very popular in his own country and cordially loved by the Emperor of Austria; she, every inch a princess, born to be the empress of a great empire, with likewise her special accomplishments. The eyes of all Europe were fixed upon them at the moment. For their marriage would not only be an imperial alliance of great political importance, but would also tie a knot of real harmony: their marriage was a love-match. There had been attempts to make it seem otherwise, but this was not correct. In Gothland, in the home circle at Altseeborgen, the young couple had learnt to know each other well; their love had sprung like an idyll from the sea and the Duke of Xara had once even saved the archduchess' life, when she had ventured out too far, in stormy weather, in a rowing-boat. Their love was like a novel with a happy ending. The Emperor Oscar would rather have seen the Grand-duchess Xenia crown-princess of Liparia and attached great value to an alliance with Russia, but he had yielded before his son's love.... And the article ended by saying that the wedding would take place in October in the old palace at Altara.
They read it together, with their mournful faces, their wide, fixed eyes, which still smarted with staring into each other's souls. Not a single remark came from their lips after reading the article; they only just smiled their two heartrending smiles; then they laid the paper down again. And she asked, with that strange calm with which this betrothed pair were trying to get to know each other:
"Othomar ... do you care for nobody?"
A flush suffused his cheeks. Did she know of Alexa?
"I did once think that I ... that I was in love," he confessed; "but I do not believe that it was really love. I now believe that I do not possess the capacity to concentrate my whole soul upon a feeling for one other soul alone; I should not know how to find it, that one soul, and I should fear to make a mistake, or to deceive myself.... No, I do not believe that I shall ever know that exclusive feeling. I rather feel within me a great, wide, general love, an immense compassion, for our people. It is strange of me perhaps...."