“You did this,” she had said once, when an unusually flagrant escapade had come to the ears of the Palace. “You did it. I told you I hated him. I told you what he was, too. But you had some plan in mind. The plan never materialized, but the marriage did. And here I am.” She had turned on him then, not angrily, but with cold hostility. “I shall never forgive you for it,” she said.
She never had. She made her daily visit to her father, and, as he grew more feeble, she was moved now and then to pity for him. But it was pity, nothing more. The very hands with which she sometimes changed his pillows were coldly efficient. She had not kissed him in years.
And now, secretly willing that Hedwig should marry Karl, she was ready to annoy him by objecting to it.
On the day after her conversation with General Mettlich, she visited the King. It was afternoon. The King had spent the morning in his study, propped with pillows as was always the case now, working with a secretary. The secretary was gone when she entered, and he sat alone. Over his knees was spread one of the brilliant rugs that the peasants wove in winter evenings, when the snow beat about their small houses and the cattle were snug in barns. Above it his thin old face looked pinched and pale.
He had passed a trying day. Once having broken down the Chancellor’s barrier of silence, the King had insisted on full knowledge; with the result that he had sat, aghast, amid the ruins of his former complacency. The country and the smaller cities were comparatively quiet, so far as demonstrations against the Government were concerned. But unquestionably they plotted. As for the capital, it was a seething riot of sedition, from the reports. A copy of a newspaper, secretly printed and more secretly circulated, had brought fire to the King’s eyes. It lay on his knees as his daughter entered.
Annunciata touched her lips to his hand. Absorbed as he was in other matters, it struck him, as she bent, that Annunciata was no longer young, and that Time w as touching her with an unloving finger. He viewed her graying hair, her ugly clothes, with the detached eye of age. And he sighed.
“Well, father,” she said, looking down at him, “how do you feel?”
“Sit down,” he said. The question as to his health was too perfunctory to require reply. Besides, he anticipated trouble, and it was an age-long habit of his to meet it halfway.
Annunciata sat, with a jingling of chains. She chose a straight chair, and faced him, very erect.
“How old is Hedwig?” demanded the King