That being a closed road, so to speak, Karl tried another. “The Crown Prince must be quite a lad,” he experimented. “He was a babe in arms, then, but frail, I thought.”
“He is sturdy now.” The Chancellor relapsed into watchfulness.
“Before I see the Princess Hedwig,” Karl made another attempt, “it might be well to tell me how she feels about things. I would like to feel that the prospect is at least not disagreeable to her.”
The Chancellor was not listening. There was trouble ahead. It had come, then, after all. He muttered something behind his gray mustache. The horses stopped, as the crowd suddenly closed in front of them.
“Drive on!” he said angrily, and the coachman touched his whip to the horses. But they only reared, to be grasped at the bridles by hostile hands ahead.
Karl half rose from his seat.
“Sit still, Majesty,” said the Chancellor. “It is the students. They will talk, that is all.”
But it came perilously near to being a riot. Led by some students, pushed by others, the crowd surrounded the two carriages, first muttering, then yelling. A stone was hurled, and struck one of the horses. Another dented the body of the carriage itself. A man with a handkerchief tied over the lower half of his face mounted the shoulders of two companions, and harangued the crowd. They wanted no friendship with Karnia. There were those who would sell them out to their neighbor and enemy. Were they to lose their national existence? He exhorted them madly through the handkerchief. Others, further back, also raised above the mob, shrieked treason, and called the citizens to arm against this thing. A Babel of noise, of swinging back and forth, of mounted police pushing through to surround the carriage, of cries and the dominating voices of the student-demagogues. Then at last a semblance of order, low muttering, an escort of police with drawn revolvers around the carriage, and it moved ahead.
Through it all the Chancellor had sat with folded arms. Only his livid face told of his fury. Karl, too, had sat impassive, picking at his small mustache. But, as the carriage moved on, he said: “A few moments ago I observed that there had been few changes. But there has been, I perceive, after all, a great change.”
“One cannot judge the many by the few, Majesty.”