I suggested deprecatingly that places had a fashion of so appearing at ten after seven in the morning.
“Yes, but look at those great, gloomy buildings and you know, Uncle Peter, you always say that what people build betrays what they are.”
“Dear me, Patsy, do I say that?” It is alarming to be confronted with one’s platitudes before breakfast!
“Yes (emphatically). Well, I think that, if the Viennese are like their architecture, they must be appallingly dull!” And Patsy wraps her furs and an air of bitter disappointment round her, and subsides into silence.
I am secretly apprehensive. To carry off a young lady of capricious fancy and unquestionable loveliness, from the thick of the balls and parties of her first season, under oath that she shall enjoy even giddier gayety in the Austrian Carnival; and to behold her gravely displeased with the very bricks and stones of the place—you will admit the situation called for anxiety.
I did what I always do in such a case, and with such a young lady: fed her—as delectable and extensive a breakfast as I could command; and then sent for a young man. To be exact, I had taken this latter precaution two or three days before, being not unacquainted with Patsy’s psychology and predilections. The young man arrived—an officer (it is always best to get an officer when one can) of no mean proportions in his dashing blue uniform and smart helmet. I introduced him to Patsy as the son of my friend Count H——, former minister to the United States. Patsy smiled—as Patsy can, and gave him a dainty three fingers. Captain Max clicked his heels together, bowed from his magnificent waist, and kissed her hand with an impressive: “Ich habe die Ehre, gnädige fräulein!” And we went to watch Guard Change in the Burg.
It is fascinating enough in itself, this old courtyard with its many gates, and weather-beaten walls surrounding the residence of the Hapsburg princes; and when filled with the Emperor’s Guards, in their grey and scarlet, and the rousing music of the royal band—to say nothing of that fierce white-whiskered old presence in the window above, surrounded by his brilliant gentlemen—I assure you it can thrill the heart of even an uncle!
Nowhere as in this ancient stronghold, under the gaze of those stern, shaggy-browed old eyes, does the tragic history of Austria so haunt one. Admitting only the figures and episodes of the life of this present Emperor, one is assailed by the memory of Elizabeth—his Empress—and her shameful assassination at Geneva; the ghastly mystery of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, the one son of the ill-starred royal pair; and the hardships and struggles of Maria Christina (the Emperor’s sister) in Spain, and the terrible murder of his brother Maximilian—sent forth in splendour to be Emperor of Mexico, but marked for death from the first. One sees the desolate mad figure of his widow shut within the wild beauty of Castle Mirmar, and wonders only how the Emperor himself can have escaped her fate. Bereft of his beautiful wife, the son he idolized, the brother he himself unknowingly sent to his destruction, Francis Joseph of Austria is at once the most solitary and indomitable personality among the rulers of the world today. Never, through all his misfortunes, has his iron pride given way to complaint or regret; and never has he confessed himself beaten.
At the age of eighty-four, he still sits erect in his saddle, and commands with characteristic imperious fire. The people sometimes laugh at his eccentricities, and are impatient of his old-fashioned ideas on certain things, but the tone in which they pronounce his title, “Unser Kaiser,” conveys their acceptance of his divine right as the pivot of their universe. In the recent war of the Balkan Allies, when the progressive Austrian party under Archduke Ferdinand clamoured against the conservative policy of the crown, the great mass of the people stood loyally by the Emperor—and so perhaps were saved the horrors and draining expense of a war of their own.
Austria is always in a ferment of one kind or another, composite as she is of half a dozen distinct and antagonistic strains of blood that have yet to be really amalgamated; but her Grand Old Man does his best to keep peace between his Slavs and Hungarians, Bohemians and Poles—and generally succeeds. He loves the pomp attached to his imperial prerogative, and is never so happy as when the centre of some elaborate ceremonial in one of his kingdoms. It tickles his vanity always to have extravagant precautions taken for his safety; and on the days when he drives to Schönbrunn (his favourite country residence) two plain clothes men and two uniformed guards are stationed at every block of the entire way from the Burg to the palace. Punctuality is another of his strong points; he departs or arrives on the dot of the hour appointed, and demands the same exactness of the officials and detectives along the road.