On that day too at Lipara, whose whiteness took tones of sombre twilight beneath mourning decorations and flags flown at half-mast, the salutes from Fort Wenceslas echoed over the town, thundering in dull tones their regular, heavy, monotonous bombardment of farewell. Lonely, majestically, in the town resounding with the salutes, stood the Imperial, empty, with its caryatids staring with gloomy, downcast eyes. The young emperor, Othomar XII., was at Altara, leading the solemn procession. The empress-mother was at the Crown Palace, with the young Empress Valérie.... Over their glamour, still shining, shone new glamours, in life which had continued, which was continuing still....
The two empresses sat side by side. Valérie held Elizabeth gently in her arms; at regular intervals the guns boomed from the fort, through the palace...
Then Elizabeth drew herself up painfully from her daughter-in-law's arms and spoke in low, oracular tones:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara.... He would so much have liked to see a Count of Lycilia...."
The guns boomed; the two empresses, in deep mourning, wept and sobbed. And now for the first time after a long interval—as there had also been a long interval at Berengar's death—Elizabeth realized all her loss, her sorrow, her misery, her despair; and she felt that that emperor, to whom, as a very young princess, now four-and-twenty years ago, she had been given in marriage, without love, she had come to love in this quarter of a century of their life in common on his high pinnacle of sovereignty....
That evening Othomar returned and, alone with his wife, with his mother, he sobbed with them, the young emperor, whom no one had seen weeping in the cathedral at Altara. For the Empress Elizabeth had repeated yet once more:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara...."
And then the Emperor of Liparia had lost his self-restraint. In one lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation, his melancholy and his despair?
And then with irrepressible sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the menace of the future, he sobbed out his grief for his father who had been and his son who was to be! He sobbed, with his head in the arms of his young empress, who, suddenly realizing that she must comfort him, had grown calm and looked calmly down upon him, taking their life of majesty upon her shoulders as though it were an oppressive, heavy mantle of purple and ermine and nothing more, taking it up so valiantly because there flowed in her veins as in his one single drop of sacred golden blood, common to all of their order, their might upon earth and their right before God....