The doctor, who was a German and disapproved of misalliances, looked him over severely before answering. “There is no sign of consciousness,” he replied slowly. “It would be as well to summon her Highness’s august parents as soon as possible, and there is a specialist at Vindobona I should be glad to have at hand. It is not likely he could suggest anything, but it is always a comfort to the patient’s friends to feel that everything possible has been done.”
The Grand-Duke and Duchess came from Molzau, Queen Ernestine from her sick-bed at Vindobona, Lord and Lady Caerleon from Geneva, where they had just laid in the grave the exiled Pauline Vassilievna, who had been more than a mother to Lady Caerleon. Never had the little inn at Drinitza been so full, or entertained such important guests, but the old landlord felt no desire to congratulate himself. The “little Princess” had won every heart during her stay, and now, to all appearance, she was dying. When her parents first arrived, she seemed to recognise them—Usk was certain that she did—but she relapsed immediately into a state in which she appeared to be conscious of nothing but pain. As if it had not been agony enough to see her suffer, Usk found very soon that the blame was supposed to be his. The Grand-Duchess could not forgive either him or Cyril for the accident. At least, she said resentfully, she thought she was securing a kind and thoughtful husband for her Lenchen when she gave her to him, but he had gone and sacrificed her to his uncle before they had been four months married. She would have kept him out of the sick-room altogether if she could, and when he insisted on taking part in the nursing, mounted guard over him the whole time to make sure that he did not disturb Helene by speaking to her. If Usk’s heart had not been very sore, and a good deal troubled by remorse, for which no one but himself and the Grand-Duchess could see any reason, he would have rebelled; but he could not engage in a squabble over his wife’s unconscious form, and his imperious mother-in-law rode roughshod over him. To his astonishment, it was the Grand-Duke who took his part. He also was banished from the sick-room, and he did not venture to dispute his wife’s decision, but he made friends with Usk in a rough kind of way, and they would take long walks together almost in silence, finding a fellow-feeling in their common grief. The Grand-Duchess, in a fury of maternal anxiety so vehement as almost to be ludicrous, made no secret of the fact that she would have preferred to be left with only Queen Ernestine and Lady Caerleon to share her labours. True, she bore a grudge against the Queen because she was Cyril’s wife, but she credited her with a genuine interest in Helene, which she denied to any of the men. They could talk of politics, she said with scorn, when Lenchen lay dying. The accusation had some colour, unreasonable though it sounded. The question of the relations between Michael and Félicia had reached an acute stage, and must speedily become common property if no solution could be devised for it.
Up to this point, chiefly by the assiduous efforts of Baroness Radnika, the fiction that Félicia was merely taking a short cruise, and that her husband had not found time to join her, had been kept up. Even the Pannonian Court had been willing to account for anything that seemed strange in the arrangement by remembering Félicia’s American education, but she had no mind to leave things in this state. When the Grand-Duke and Duchess paid her a hurried visit on board the yacht on their way to Drinitza, she told them the facts of the case with the greatest frankness, and refused to hear of a reconciliation. A separation she wanted, and a separation she would have, and the Grand-Duke saw no way of avoiding a scandal. He took counsel with Cyril and Mr Hicks (these conversations it was which aroused the Grand-Duchess’s ire), and they beat their brains for some means of bringing Félicia back to Bellaviste. King Michael was far from implacable. He admired Félicia intensely, and was really as much in love with her as it was possible to him to be, and he had the grace to be heartily ashamed of his own part in the dispute. He saw it now through Félicia’s eyes, and admired her secretly for resenting his conduct, and he was also painfully alive to the ridicule that would descend upon him if it came out that he had driven away his three months’ bride by his groundless jealousy. He was willing to make promises and concessions for the future, but Félicia opposed a simple negative to all his proposals. Once more Cyril became the natural go-between, and travelled first to Bellaviste to interview the King, and then across the peninsula to Paranati to try to influence Félicia, but all in vain.
These journeys were not undertaken without strong remonstrance from Queen Ernestine, who never saw her husband depart without fearing that his enemies might contrive to get him again into their power. But he never travelled without either the Grand-Duke, Mr Hicks, or Lord Caerleon, and two or three armed servants, and with such precautions it was not likely that he would now incur danger. Dr Gregorescu had prudently disappeared, and his Dardanians were merged again in the general mass of their fellow-countrymen. It was in the highest degree unlikely that either Prince Soudaroff or the Princess of Dardania would attempt any further hostile move, when the victim was able to recount the whole history of the one that had just failed, although he had not at present chosen to make it public. Moreover, the political reasons which had induced the Scythian Chancellor to join in the plot existed no longer, and he recognised that he had been cleverly led aside by a false clue. Before the Emperor Timoleon V. had sat for a month upon the throne of Neustria, the world was startled by a rescript issued jointly by himself and his brother monarch of Scythia. From this document it appeared that the Scythian troops which had for three years occupied Jerusalem would be withdrawn immediately, and the city handed over to the representatives of the Jewish provisional government which had sat during that period at Nablus. Palestine would be neutralised, and the Jewish State guaranteed in its independence and privileges (nothing being said of the shadowy suzerainty of Roum) by Neustria, Scythia, and the United States of America.
There was little real opposition to the measure. The new alliance was immensely formidable, besides representing roughly the three Christian creeds which were wont to battle over the sacred soil. England had lost her opportunity of protesting when she acquiesced in the Scythian occupation of Jerusalem three years before, and Hercynia was quieted by receiving compensation elsewhere, as usual at the expense of Roum. There was a wild outcry from the mass of the poorer Jews that no provision was made for appointing a Prince of Palestine, but Cyril made it known that he should refuse to be nominated even if the post were constituted. As he had said, the agony of his captivity had made him an old man all at once, and he felt no temptation to mingle any longer in politics. It was typical of the change wrought in the man by the disastrous result of his last experience of the political arena, that he now desired nothing more than to return with his wife to the oasis in the Syrian desert, within whose narrow limits he had so often chafed, and there end his days in quietness.
And in the mean time, while the two Emperors were reorganising the map of the world, and Félicia was reiterating her undying defiance of her husband, Helene still lay unconscious in the inn at Drinitza. The agonies of pain had passed, but she did not recover. She had not sufficient vitality, the doctors said, to rally from the shock and the long suffering, and it was not unlikely that her life would flicker out without so much as a return to consciousness.
CHAPTER XXIV.
RISORGIMENTO.
As to Helene herself, the days and weeks passed by without her knowledge. Once only since the accident had she waked to a brief interval of full consciousness, and that was when the old home voices first penetrated her dulled ear. Her father and mother were in the room as well as Usk, and she lay looking at them without their perceiving it, making no attempt to speak. But when the Grand-Duchess broke down and wept stormily, crying out to Usk, “You stole her away from us, and this is the way you take care of her!” the injustice of the speech moved her to protest. She tried to speak, but no words would come, and though Usk met her anguished eyes, and nodded reassuringly at her, she could not vindicate him. She saw her father lay his hand upon his shoulder, as though he felt he was unjustly accused, but the Grand-Duchess was evidently implacable. Helene still struggled to speak, but the effort was too great, and she relapsed into immobility, which yet was not complete unconsciousness, for she was very conscious of pain, although the outer world was a blank to her. To herself she seemed to be borne and buffeted on a sea of pain; she sounded its lowest depths, and was carried up to the height of its hugest waves. There was the pain which attacked her in a succession of violent shocks, like billows breaking over a helpless shipwrecked man on a rocky shore, and swept her away at last into such agony that she was forced to scream; and the pain which crept upwards slowly and gradually, like a gently rising tide, until her whole frame seemed nothing but one dull, paralysing ache, and all kinds and degrees of pain between these two extremes. She battled against this sea, she thought, although in some strange way the sound of the breakers and the throb of the rising waves was inside her head and not outside, as though she was playing the traitor to herself, but it attacked her persistently in fresh ways, and she felt that it must prove the stronger at last. But just when her strength was altogether at an end, and she knew that she could struggle no longer, the necessity for struggling ceased. There was no sea at all, either rough or smooth, and she was drifting gently down a broad calm river. Sometimes she had glimpses of scenes on the banks, sometimes she heard strange toneless voices speaking loudly, although she could not distinguish what they said, but she never saw any place or person or heard any voice that she knew. Most often, although the sensation of floating continued, the sights before her eyes were merely complicated patterns, endless in diversity and colour, which melted one into another like those of a kaleidoscope. It was very interesting to watch them, and she followed their changes eagerly, drifting down the river all the time.
There came disquieting interruptions to her enjoyment at last. Voices called to her—not the unknown voices of her visions, but voices that she knew—called to her earnestly, entreatingly, forcing themselves upon her attention when she desired only to watch the moving patterns. She felt a kind of resentment against these voices—a sort of malicious satisfaction in the fact that she could not answer their appeals, for there seemed to be a weight on her lips that kept them from moving. If only the voices would leave her in peace! There they were again, calling: “Lenchen, Lenchen! my little Lenchen! look at me, speak to me!” Before her eyes was a dun expanse flecked by splashes of colour that came and went, and against this background shadowy discs and half-discs appeared vaguely, took definite shape, became flaming and metallic, and vanished slowly away, as she watched them with breathless interest. She could not answer the cry that reached her, for the weight was still upon her lips, but it banished the vision, and in its place she saw a curious patchwork of many shapes and colours and patterns, something like the mosaic which industrious persons construct with small pieces of broken china sunk in cement. This also was interesting, although it had not the fascination of those advancing and receding discs, and she was watching the mosaic brighten and fade and re-group itself in new designs, when another voice broke in upon the dream, and made it vanish in its turn.
“Nell! Nell!” the voice cried, in tones of agony, and for the first time Helene felt an impulse to answer. But the weight was still upon her lips, and on the whole she was glad of it. Turning aside, as it were, petulantly from the call, she set herself joyfully to the contemplation of a myriad tiny bunches of pink-tipped daisies, floating in an atmosphere of dark dull green, which appealed to her almost more than all that had gone before. Nothing could be lovelier than this. Would it stay? would the daisy-buds unfold, or would they vanish into something else? Helene never knew, for into the midst of her vision came another sound, clear and distinct, the sound of a sob, before which the vision departed suddenly. She opened her eyes. There seemed to be no one in the room, but the sound of another sob guided her eyes to where Usk was kneeling beside the bed, his face hidden in the coverlid. The sight awoke Helene to pity and concern at once.