“Cancel all my engagements,” she said. “I shall not go out to-day. Tell the Court newsman that I am indisposed—a bad cold—anything.”
“As your Imperial Highness commands,” responded De Trauttenberg, bowing, and yet showing no sign that she observed the disfiguration of her poor face.
The woman’s cold formality irritated her.
“You see the reason?” she asked meaningly, looking into her face.
“I note that your Imperial Highness has—has met with a slight accident,” she said. “I trust it is not painful.”
That reply aroused the fire of the Hapsbourg blood within her veins. The woman was her bitter enemy. She had lied about her, and had poisoned her husband’s mind against her. And yet she was helpless. To dismiss her from her duties would only be a confirmation of what the woman had, no doubt, alleged.
It was upon the tip of her tongue to charge her openly as an enemy and a liar. It was that woman, no doubt, who had spied upon her when she had called upon Count Leitolf, and who on her return to Treysa had gone straight to the Crown Prince with a story that was full of vile and scandalous inventions.
“Oh, dear, no,” she said, managing to control her anger by dint of great effort. “It is not at all painful, I assure you. Perhaps, Trauttenberg, you had better go at once and tell the newsman, so that my absence at the Schilling unveiling will be accounted for.”
Thus dismissed, the woman, with her false smiles and pretended sympathy, went forth, and the journals through Germany that day reported, with regret, that the Crown Princess Claire of Marburg was confined to her room, having caught a severe chill on her journey from Vienna, and that she would probably remain indisposed for a week.
When her maids had dressed her she passed on into her gorgeous little blue-and-gold boudoir, her own sanctum, for in it were all the little nick-nacks, odds and ends which on her marriage she had brought from her own home at Wartenstein. Every object reminded her of those happy days of her youth, before she was called upon to assume the shams of royal place and power; before she entered that palace that was to her but a gilded prison.