“What do you mean?” cried the Princess, frightened.
“Why, it is of no matter,” he answered, as if he already regretted having said so much, and he turned away abruptly and looked out of the window at the rain, the grey sky, and the dripping trees.
Amalia of Solms watched him, the old fear catching at her heart.
She had been told that it would be a miracle if he grew to manhood, as she had been assured that he would never survive his infancy. She trusted one prediction would prove as false as the other, but as she considered his frail appearance, his eyes shadowed with pain, his colourless face, his languid movements; as she recalled his incessant cough, his perpetual headaches, the horrible conviction struck her that it was impossible for him to live long. She had a vague, disquieting sense, too, of some vast, ambitious, and proud spirit contained in the delicate body. Her grandson had never made a confidant of her, but she felt he cherished designs of she knew not what magnitude, and she was troubled for the loneliness he would not allow her to share.
The tears came to her eyes as she looked at him.
He stood leaning against the window frame, one hand on his hip, his proud and commanding profile towards her; the low brow shaded by the dark hair, the pale mouth firmly set. He wore his green velvet riding-dress and a plain cravat of Frisian needlework. He had no sword, for M. de Witt held that none save a soldier should go armed.
There was recalled to the Princess Amalia the image of another young man as she had seen him in his hunting dress, eighteen years ago, the last Stadtholder, not much older than his son was now, like him in features and in pride, on the eve, he believed, of absolute power.
The Princess could remember how he had bent his whip in his hand and spoken of “these presumptuous burghers!”
A week afterwards he lay dead of the smallpox in Guelders, and the triumphant States were casting a medal to celebrate their deliverance; representing the Stadtholder as Phæton, with the motto: “Magnis excidit ausis.”
“By his great designs he destroyed himself.”