The room was in darkness, save for the tiny silver lamp burning before the picture of the Madonna. The Trauttenberg had found her lying insensible, and with Henriette’s aid had restored her to consciousness and put her to bed. Then the Countess had gone along to the Crown Prince and told him that his wife had been seized with a fainting fit, and was indisposed.
And the three guests, when he told them, exchanged significant glances, and were silent.
In the darkness, with the moonlight falling across the room, the Princess, in her white silk dressing-gown, sat staring straight before her out upon the fairy-like scene presented below. No word escaped her pale lips, yet she shuddered, and drew her laces about her as though she were chilled.
She was recalling those hard words of her husband’s which she had overheard—the words that revealed to her the ghastly truth. If ever she had suffered during her married life, she suffered at that moment. It was cruel, unjust, dastardly. Was there no love or justice for her?
The truth was a ghastly one. Those three strangers whom her husband had introduced to her table as guests were doctors, two from Berlin and the third from Cologne—specialists in mental disease. They had come there for the purpose of adding their testimony and certificates to that of Veltman, the crafty, thin-nosed Court physician, to declare that she was insane!
What fees were promised those men, or how that plot had been matured, she could only imagine. Yet the grim fact remained that her enemies, with the old King and her husband at their head, intended to confine her in an asylum.
She had heard her husband himself suggest that on the morrow they should meet Veltman, a white-bearded, bald-headed old charlatan whom she detested, and add their testimony to his that she was not responsible for her actions. Could anything be more cold-blooded, more absolutely outrageous? Those words of her husband showed her plainly that in his heart there now remained not one single spark either of affection or of sentiment. He was anxious, at all hazards and at whatever cost, by fair means or foul, to rid himself of her.
Her enemies were now playing their trump card. They had no doubt bribed those three men to certify what was a direct untruth. A royal sovereign can, alas I command the services of any one; for everybody, more or less, likes to render to royalty a service in the hope of decoration or of substantial reward. Most men are at heart place-seekers. Men who are most honest and upright in their daily lives will not hesitate to perjure themselves, or “stretch a point” as they would doubtless put it, where royalty is concerned.
Gazing out into the brilliant moonlight mirrored upon the smooth surface of the lake, she calmly reviewed the situation.
She was in grave peril—so grave, indeed, that she was now utterly bewildered as to what her next step should be. Once certified as a lunatic and shut up in an asylum somewhere away in the heart of the country, all hope of the future would be cut off. She would be entirely at the mercy of those who so persistently and unscrupulously sought her end. Having failed in their other plot against, her, they intended to consign her to a living tomb.