When, that night, he fell asleep, it was still clasped in his old hand, and there was a look of grim tenderness on the face on the pillow, turned toward his dead son’s picture.
Troubled times now, with the Carnival only a day or two off, and the shop windows gay with banners; with the press under the house of the concierge running day and night, and turning out vast quantities of flaming bulletins printed in red; with the Committee of Ten in almost constant session, and Olga Loschek summoned before it, to be told of the passage, and the thing she was to do; with the old King very close to the open door, and Hedwig being fitted for her bridal robe and for somber black at one fitting.
Troubled times, indeed. The city was smouldering, and from some strange source had come a new rumor. Nothing less than that the Royalists, headed by the Chancellor, despairing of crowning the boy Prince, would, on the King’s death, make away with him, thus putting Hedwig on the throne Hedwig, Queen of Karnia perhaps already by secret marriage.
The city, which adored the boy, was seething. The rumor had originated with Olga Loschek, who had given it to the Committee as a useful weapon. Thus would she have her revenge on those of the Palace, and at the same time secure her own safety. Revenge, indeed, for she knew the way of such rumors, how they fly from house to house, street to street. How the innocent, proclaiming their innocence, look even the more guilty.
When she had placed the scheme before the Committee of Ten, had seen the eagerness with which they grasped it—“In this way,” she had said, in her scornful, incisive tones, “the onus of the boy is not on you, but on them. Even those who have no sympathy with your movement will burn at such a rumor. The better the citizen, the more a lover of home and order, the more outraged he will be. Every man in the city with a child of his own will rise against the Palace.”
“Madame,” the leader had said, “you should be of the Committee.”
But she had ignored the speech contemptuously, and gone on to other things.
Now everything was arranged. Black Humbert had put his niece to work on a Carnival dress for a small boy, and had stayed her curiosity by a hint that it was for the American lad.
“They are comfortable tenants,” he had said. “Not lavish, perhaps, as rich Americans should be, but orderly, and pleasant. The boy has good manners. It would be well to please him.”
So the niece, sewing in the back room, watched Bobby in and out, with pleasant mysteries in her eyes, and sewing sang the song the cathedral chimed:
So she sang, and sewed, and measured Bobby’s height as he passed by the wainscoting in the passage, and cunningly cut a pattern.
“So high,” she reflected, humming, “is his shoulder. And so, to this panel, should go the little trousers. ‘Star in desert drear and wild.’”
Now and then, in the evenings, when the Americans were away, and Bobby was snug in bed, with Tucker on the tiny feather comfort at his feet, the Fraulein would come downstairs and sit in Black Humbert’s room. At such times the niece would be sent on an errand, and the two would talk. The niece, who, although she had no lover, was on the lookout for love, suspected a romance of the middle-aged, and smiled in the half-darkness of the street; smiled with a touch of malice, as one who has pierced the armor of the fortress, and knows its weakness.
But it was not of love that Humbert and the Fraulein talked.
Herman Spier was busy in those days and making plans. Thus, day by day, he dined in the restaurant where the little Marie, now weary of her husband, sat in idle intervals behind the cashier’s desk, and watched the grass in the Place emerge from its winter hiding place. When she turned her eyes to the room, frequently she encountered those of Herman Spier, pale yet burning, fixed on her. And at last, one day when her husband lay lame with sciatica, she left the desk and paused by Herman’s table.
“You come frequently now,” she observed. “It is that you like us here, or that you have risen in the shop?”
“I have left the shop,” said Herman, staring at her. Flesh, in a moderate amount, suited her well. He liked plump women. They were, if you please, an armful. “And I come to see you.”
“Left the shop!” Marie exclaimed. “And Peter Niburg—he has left also? I never see him.”
“No,” said Herman non-committally.
“He is ill, perhaps?”
“He is dead,” said Herman, devouring her with his eyes.
“Dead!” She put a hand to her plump side.
“Aye. Shot as a spy.” He took another piece of the excellent pigeon pie. Marie, meantime, lost all her looks, grew pasty white.
“Of the—the Terrorists?” she demanded, in a whisper.
“Terrorists! No. Of Karnia. He was no patriot.”
So the little Marie went back to her desk, and to her staring out over the Place in intervals of business. And what she thought of no one can know. But that night, and thereafter, she was very tender to her spouse, and put cloths soaked in hot turpentine water on his aching thigh.
On the surface things went on as usual at the Palace. Karl’s visit had been but for a day or two. He had met the Council in session, and had had, because of their growing alarm, rather his own way with them.
But although he had pointed to the King’s condition and theirs—as an argument for immediate marriage—he failed. The thing would be done, but properly and in good time. They had a signed agreement to fall back upon, and were in no hurry to pay his price. Karl left them in a bad temper, well concealed, and had the pleasure of being hissed through the streets.
But he comforted himself with the thought of Hedwig. He had taken her in his arms before he left, and she had made no resistance. She had even, in view of all that was at stake, made a desperate effort to return his kiss, and found herself trembling afterward.
In two weeks he was to return to her, and he whispered that to her.
On the day after the dinner-party Otto went to a hospital with Miss Braithwaite. It was the custom of the Palace to send the flowers from its spectacular functions to the hospitals, and the Crown Prince delighted in these errands.
So they went, escorted by the functionaries of the hospital, past the military wards, where soldiers in shabby uniforms sat on benches in the spring sunshine, to the general wards beyond. The Crown Prince was almost hidden behind the armful he carried. Miss Braithwaite had all she could hold. A convalescent patient, in slippers many sizes too large for him, wheeled the remainder in a barrow, and almost upset the barrow in his excitement.
Through long corridors into wards fresh-scrubbed against his arrival, with white counterpanes exactly square, and patients forbidden to move and disturb the geometrical exactness of the beds, went Prince Ferdinand William Otto. At each bed he stopped, selected a flower, and held it out. Some there were who reached out, and took it with a smile. Others lay still, and saw neither boy nor blossom.
“They sleep, Highness,” the nurse would say.
“But their eyes are open.”
“They are very weary, and resting.”
In such cases he placed the flower on the pillow, and went on.
One such; however, lying with vacant eyes fixed on the ceiling, turned and glanced at the boy, and into his empty gaze crept a faint intelligence. It was not much. He seemed to question with his eyes. That was all. As the little procession moved on, however, he raised himself on his elbow.
“Lie down!” said the man in the next bed sharply.
“Who was that?”
The ward, which might have been interested, was busy keeping its covers straight and in following the progress of the party. For the man had not spoken before.
“The Crown Prince.”
The sick man lay back and dosed his eyes. Soon he slept. His comrade in the next bed beckoned to a Sister.
“He has spoken,” he said. “Either he recovers, or—he dies.”
But again Haeckel did not die. He lived to do his part in the coming crisis, to prove that even the great hands of Black Humbert on his throat were not so strong as his own young spirit; lived, indeed, to confront the Terrorist as one risen from the dead. But that day he lay and slept, by curious irony the flower from Karl’s banquet in a cup of water beside him.
On the day before the Carnival, Hedwig had a visitor, none other than the Countess Loschek. Hedwig, all her color gone now, her high spirit crushed, her heart torn into fragments and neatly distributed between Nikky, who had most of it, the Crown Prince, and the old King. Hedwig, having given her permission to come, greeted her politely but without enthusiasm.
“Highness!” said the Countess, surveying her. And then, “You poor child!” using Karl’s words, but without the same inflection, using, indeed, the words a good many were using to Hedwig in those days.
“I am very tired,” Hedwig explained. “All this fitting, and—everything.”
“I know, perhaps better than you think, Highness.” Also something like Karl’s words. Hedwig reflected with bitterness that everybody knew, but nobody helped her. And, as if in answer to the thought, Olga Loschek came out plainly.
“Highness,” she said, “may I speak to you frankly?”
“Please do,” Hedwig replied. “Everybody does, anyhow. Especially when it is something disagreeable.”
Olga Loschek watched her warily. She knew the family as only the outsider could know it; knew that Hedwig, who would have disclaimed the fact, was like her mother in some things, notably in a disposition to be mild until a certain moment, submissive, even acquiescent, and then suddenly to become, as it were, a royalty and grow cold, haughty. But if Hedwig was driven in those days, so was the Countess, desperate and driven to desperate methods.
“I am presuming, Highness, on your mother’s kindness to me, and your own, to speak frankly.”
“Well, go on,” said Hedwig resignedly. But the next words brought her up in her chair.
“Are you going to allow your life to be ruined?” was what the Countess said.
Careful! Hedwig had thrown up her head and looked at her with hostile eyes. But the next moment she had forgotten she was a princess, and the granddaughter to the King, and remembered only that she was a woman, and terror-stricken. She flung out her arms, and then buried her face in them.
“How can I help it?” she said.
“How can you do it?” Olga Loschek countered. “After all, it is you who must do this thing. No one else. It is you they are offering on the altar of their ambition.”
“Ambition?”
“Ambition. What else is it? Surely you do not believe these tales they tell—old wives’ tales of plot and counterplot!”
“But the Chancellor—”
“Certainly the Chancellor!” mocked Olga Loschek. “Highness, for years he has had a dream. A great dream. It is not for you and me to say it is not noble. But, to fulfill his dream to bring prosperity and greatness to the country, and naturally, to him who plans it, there is a price to pay. He would have you pay it.”
Hedwig raised her face and searched the other woman’s eyes.
“That is all, then?” she said. “All this other, this fright, this talk of treason and danger, that is not true?”
“Not so true as he would have you believe,” replied Olga Loschek steadily. “There are malcontents everywhere, in every land. A few madmen who dream dreams, like Mettlich himself, only not the same dream. It is all ambition, one dream or another.”
“But my grandfather—”
“An old man, in the hands of his Ministers!”
Hedwig rose and paced the floor, her fingers twisting nervously. “But it is too late,” she cried at last. “Everything is arranged. I cannot refuse now. They would—I don’t know what they would do to me!”
“Do! To the granddaughter of the King. What can they do?”
That aspect of things; to do her credit, had never occurred to Hedwig. She had seen herself, hopeless and alone, surrounded by the powerful, herself friendless. But, if there was no danger to save her family from? If her very birth, which had counted so far for so little, would bring her immunity and even safety?
She paused in front of the Countess. “What can I do?” she asked pitifully.
“That I dare not presume to say. I came because I felt—I can only say what, in your place, I should do.”
“I am afraid. You would not be afraid.” Hedwig shivered. “What would you do?”
“If I knew, Highness, that some one, for whom I cared, himself cared deeply enough to make any sacrifice, I should demand happiness. I rather think I should lose the world, and gain something like happiness.”
“Demand!” Hedwig said hopelessly. “Yes, you would demand it. I cannot demand things. I am always too frightened.”
The Countess rose. “I am afraid I have done an unwise thing,” she said, “If your mother knew—” She shrugged her shoulders.
“You have only been kind. I have so few who really care.”
The Countess curtsied, and made for the door. “I must go,” she said, “before I go further, Highness. My apology is that I saw you unhappy, and that I resented it, because—”
“Yes?”
“Because I considered it unnecessary.”
She was a very wise woman. She left then, and let the next step come from Hedwig. It followed, as a matter of record, within the hour, at least four hours sooner than she had anticipated. She was in her boudoir, not reading, not even thinking, but sitting staring ahead, as Minna had seen her do repeatedly in the past weeks. She dared not think, for that matter.
Although she was still in waiting, the Archduchess was making few demands on her. A very fever of preparation was on Annunciata. She spent hours over laces and lingerie, was having jewels reset for Hedwig, after ornate designs of her own contribution, was the center of a cyclone of boxes, tissue paper, material, furs, and fashion books, while maids scurried about and dealers and dressmakers awaited her pleasure. She was, perhaps, happier than she had been for years, visited her father, absently and with pins stuck in her bosom, and looked dowdier and busier than the lowliest of the seamstresses who, by her thrifty order, were making countless undergarments in a room on an upper floor.
Hedwig’s notification that she would visit her, therefore, found the Countess at leisure and alone. She followed the announcement almost immediately, and if she had shown cowardice before, she showed none now. She disregarded the chair Olga Loschek offered, and came to the point with a directness that was like the King’s.
“I have come,” she said simply, “to find out what to do.”
The Countess was as direct.
“I cannot tell you what to do, Highness. I can only tell you what I would do.”
“Very well.” Hedwig showed a touch of impatience. This was quibbling, and it annoyed her.
“I should go away, now, with the person I cared about.”
“Where would you go?”
“The world is wide, Highness.”
“Not wide enough to hide in, I am afraid.”
“For myself,” said the Countess, “the problem would not be difficult. I should go to my place in the mountains. An old priest, who knows me well, would perform the marriage. After that they might find me if they liked. It would be too late.”
Emergency had given Hedwig insight. She saw that the woman before her, voicing dangerous doctrine, would protect herself by letting the initiative come from her.
“This priest—he might be difficult.”
“Not to a young couple, come to him, perhaps, in peasant costume. They are glad to marry, these fathers. There is much irregularity. I fancy,” she added, still with her carefully detached manner, “that a marriage could be easily arranged.”
But, before long, she had dropped her pretense of aloofness, and was taking the lead. Hedwig, weary with the struggle, and now trembling with nervousness, put herself in her hands, listening while she planned, agreed eagerly to everything. Something of grim amusement came into Olga Loschek’s face after a time. By doing this thing she would lose everything. It would be impossible to conceal her connivance. No one, knowing Hedwig, would for a moment imagine the plan hers. Or Nikky’s, either, for that matter.
She, then, would lose everything, even Karl, who was already lost to her. But—and her face grew set and her eyes hard—she would let those plotters in their grisly catacombs do their own filthy work. Her hands would be clean of that. Hence her amusement that at this late day she, Olga Loschek, should be saving her own soul.
So it was arranged, to the last detail. For it must be done at once. Hedwig, a trifle terrified, would have postponed it a day or so, but the Countess was insistent. Only she knew how the very hours counted, had them numbered, indeed, and watched them flying by with a sinking heart.
She made a few plans herself, in those moments when Hedwig relapsed into rapturous if somewhat frightened dreams. She had some money and her jewels. She would go to England, and there live quietly until things settled down. Then, perhaps, she would go some day to Karl, and with this madness for Hedwig dead, of her marriage, perhaps—! She planned no further.
If she gave a fleeting thought to the Palace, to the Crown Prince and his impending fate, she dismissed it quickly. She had no affection for Annunciata, and as to the boy, let them look out for him. Let Mettlich guard his treasure, or lose it to his peril. The passage under the gate was not of her discovery or informing.
Nikky had gone back to his lodging, where his servant was packing his things. For Nikky was now of His Majesty’s household, and must exchange his shabby old rooms for the cold magnificence of the Palace.
Toto had climbed to the chair beside him, and was inspecting his pockets, one by one. Toto was rather a problem, in the morning. But then everything was a problem now. He decided to leave the dog with the landlady, and to hope for a chance to talk the authorities over. Nikky himself considered that a small boy without a dog was as incomplete as, for instance, a buttonhole without a button.
He was very downhearted. To the Crown Prince, each day, he gave the best that was in him, played and rode, invented delightful nonsense to bring the boy’s quick laughter, carried pocketfuls of bones, to the secret revolt of his soldierly soul, was boyish and tender, frivolous or thoughtful, as the occasion seemed to warrant.
And always he was watchful, his revolver always ready and in touch, his eyes keen, his body, even when it seemed most relaxed, always tense to spring. For Nikky knew the temper of the people, knew it as did Mathilde gossiping in the market, and even better; knew that a crisis was approaching, and that on this small boy in his charge hung that crisis.
The guard at the Palace had been trebled, but even in that lay weakness.
“Too many strange faces,” the Chancellor had said to him, shaking his head. “Too many servants in livery, and flunkies whom no one knows. How can we prevent men, in such livery, from impersonating our own agents? One, two, a half-dozen, they could gain access to the Palace, could commit a mischief under our very eyes.”
So Nikky trusted in his own right arm and in nothing else. At night the Palace guard was smaller, and could be watched. There were no servants about to complicate the situation. But in the daytime, and especially now with the procession of milliners and dressmakers, messengers and dealers, it was more difficult. Nikky watched these people, as he happened on them, with suspicion and hatred. Hatred not only of what they might be, but hatred of what they were, of the thing they typified, Hedwig’s approaching marriage.
The very size of the Palace, its unused rooms, its long and rambling corridors, its rambling wings and ancient turrets, was against its safety.
Since the demonstration against Karl, the riding-school hour had been given up. There were no drives in the park. The illness of the King furnished sufficient excuse, but the truth was that the royal family was practically besieged; by it knew not what. Two police agents had been found dead the morning after Karl’s departure, on the outskirts of the city, lying together in a freshly ploughed field. They bore marks of struggle, and each had been stabbed through the veins of the neck, as though they had been first subdued and then scientifically destroyed.
Nikky, summoned to the Chancellor’s house that morning, had been told the facts, and had stood, rather still and tense, while Mettlich recounted them.
“Our very precautions are our danger,” said the Chancellor. “And the King—” He stopped and sat, tapping his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“And the King, sir?”
“Almost at the end. A day or two.”
On that day came fresh news, alarming enough. More copies of the seditious paper were in circulation in the city and the surrounding country, passing from hand to hand. The town was searched for the press which had printed them, but it was not located. Which was not surprising, since it had been lowered through a trap into a sub-cellar of the house on the Road of the Good Children, and the trapdoor covered with rubbish.
Karl, with Hedwig in his thoughts, had returned to mobilize his army not far from the border for the spring maneuvers, and at a meeting of the King’s Council the matter of a mobilization in Livonia was seriously considered.
Fat Friese favored it, and made an impassioned speech, with sweat thick on his heavy face.
“I am not cowardly,” he finished. “I fear nothing for myself or for those belonging to me. But the duty of this Council is to preserve the throne for the Crown Prince, at any cost. And, if we cannot trust the army, in what can we trust?”
“In God,” said the Chancellor grimly.
In the end nothing was done. Mobilization might precipitate the crisis, and there was always the fear that the army, in parts, was itself disloyal.
It was Marschall, always nervous and now pallid with terror, who suggested abandoning the marriage between Hedwig and Karl.
“Until this matter came up,” he said, avoiding Mettlich’s eyes, “there was danger, but of a small party only, the revolutionary one. One which, by increased effort on the part of the secret police, might have been suppressed. It is this new measure which is fatal. The people detest it. They cannot forget, if we can, the many scores of hatred we still owe to Karnia. We have, by our own act, alienated the better class of citizens. Why not abandon this marriage, which, gentlemen, I believe will be fatal. It has not yet been announced. We may still withdraw with honor.”
He looked around the table with anxious, haunted eyes, opened wide so that the pupils appeared small and staring in their setting of blood-shot white. The Chancellor glanced around, also.
“It is not always easy to let the people of a country know what is good for them and for it. To retreat now is to show our weakness, to make an enemy again of King Karl, and to gain us nothing, not even safety. As well abdicate, and turn the country over to the Terrorists! And, in this crisis, let me remind you of something you persistently forget. Whatever the views of the solid citizens may be as to this marriage,—and once it is effected, they will accept it without doubt,—the Crown Prince is now and will remain the idol of the country. It is on his popularity we must depend. We must capitalize it. Mobs are sentimental. Whatever the Terrorists may think, this I know: that when the bell announces His Majesty’s death, when Ferdinand William Otto steps out on the balcony, a small and lonely child, they will rally to him. That figure, on the balcony, will be more potent than a thousand demagogues, haranguing in the public streets.”
The Council broke up in confusion. Nothing had been done, or would be done. Mettlich of the Iron Hand had held them, would continue to hold them. The King, meanwhile, lay dying, Doctor Wiederman in constant attendance, other physicians coming and going. His apartments were silent. Rugs covered the corridors, that no footfall disturb his quiet hours. The nursing Sisters attended him, one by his bedside, one always on her knees at the Prie-dieu in the small room beyond. He wanted little—now and then a sip of water, the cooled juice of fruit.
Injections of stimulants, given by Doctor Wiederman himself, had scarred his old arms with purplish marks, and were absorbed more and more slowly as the hours went on.
He rarely slept, but lay inert and not unhappy. Now and then one of his gentlemen, given permission, tiptoed into the room, and stood looking down at his royal master. Annunciata came, and was at last stricken by conscience to a prayer at his bedside. On one of her last visits that was. She got up to find his eyes fixed on her.
“Father,” she began.
He made no motion.
“Father, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“I—I have been a bad daughter to you. I am sorry. It is late now to tell you, but I am sorry. Can I do anything?”
“Otto,” he said, with difficulty.
“You want to see him?
“No.”
She knew what he meant by that. He would have the boy remember him as he had seen him last.
“You are anxious about him?”
“Very—anxious.”
“Listen, father,” she said, stooping over him. “I have been hard and cold. Perhaps you will grant that I have had two reasons for it. But I am going to do better. I will take care of him and I will do all I can to make him happy. I promise.”
Perhaps it was relief. Perhaps even then the thought of Annunciata’s tardy and certain-to-be bungling efforts to make Ferdinand William Otto happy amused him. He smiled faintly.
Nikky, watching his rooms being dismantled, rescuing an old pipe now and then, or a pair of shabby but beloved boots,—Nikky, whistling to keep up his courage, received a note from Hedwig late that afternoon. It was very brief:
Nikky, who in all his incurious young life had never thought of the roof of the Palace, save as a necessary shelter from the weather, a thing of tiles and gutters, vastly large, looked rather astounded.
“The roof!” he said, surveying the note. And fell to thinking, such a mixture of rapture and despair as only twenty-three, and hopeless, can know.
Somehow or other he got through the intervening hours, and before nine he was on his way. He had the run of the Palace, of course. No one noticed him as he made his way toward the empty suite which so recently had housed its royal visitor. Annunciata’s anxiety had kept the doors of the suite unlocked. Knowing nothing, but fearing everything, she slept with the key to the turret door under her pillow, and an ear opened for untoward sounds.
In the faint moonlight poor Hubert’s rooms, with their refurbished furnishings covered with white linen, looked cold and almost terrifying. A long window was open, and the velvet curtain swayed as though it shielded some dismal figure. But, when he had crossed the room and drawn the curtain aside, it was to see a bit of fairyland, the roof moonlit and transformed by growing things into a garden. There was, too, the fairy.
Hedwig, in a soft white wrap over her dinner dress, was at the balustrade. The moon, which had robbed the flowers of their colors and made them ghosts of blossoms, had turned Hedwig into a pale, white fairy with extremely frightened eyes. A very dignified fairy, too, although her heart thumped disgracefully. Having taken a most brazen step forward, she was now for taking two panicky ones back.
Therefore she pretended not to hear Nikky behind her, and was completely engrossed in the city lights.
So Hedwig intended to be remote, and Nikky meant to be firm and very, very loyal. Which shows how young and inexperienced they were. Because any one who knows even the beginnings of love knows that its victims suffer from an atrophy of both reason and conscience, and a hypertrophy of the heart.
Whatever Nikky had intended—of obeying his promise to the letter, of putting his country before love, and love out of his life—failed him instantly. The Nikky, ardent-eyed and tender-armed, who crossed the roof and took her almost fiercely in his arms, was all lover—and twenty-three.
“Sweetheart!” he said. “Sweetest heart!”
When, having kissed her, he drew back a trifle for the sheer joy of again catching her to him, it was Hedwig who held out her arms to him.
“I couldn’t bear it,” she said simply. “I love you. I had to see you again. Just once.”
If he had not entirely lost his head before, he lost it then. He stopped thinking, was content for a time that her arms were about his neck, and his arms about her, holding her close. They were tense, those arms of his, as though he would defy the world to take her away.
But, although he had stopped thinking, Hedwig had not. It is, at such times, always the woman who thinks. Hedwig, plotting against his honor and for his happiness and hers, was already, with her head on his breast, planning the attack. And, having a strategic position, she fired her first gun from there.
“Never let me go, Nikky,” she whispered. “Hold me, always.”
“Always!” said Nikky, valiantly and absurdly.
“Like this?”
“Like this,” said Nikky, who was, like most lovers, not particularly original. He tightened his strong arms about her.
“They are planning such terrible things.” Shell number two, and high explosive. “You won’t let them take me from you, will you?”
“God!” said poor Nikky, and kissed her hair. “If we could only be like this always! Your arms, Hedwig,—your sweet arms!” He kissed her arms.
Gun number three now: “Tell me how much you love me.”
“I—there are no words, darling. And I couldn’t live long enough to tell you, if there were.” Not bad that, for inarticulate Nikky.
“More than anybody else?”
He shook her a trifle, in his arms. “How can you?” he demanded huskily. “More than anything in the world. More than life, or anything life can bring. More, God help me, than my country.”
But his own words brought him up short. He released her, very gently, and drew back a step.
“You heard that?” he demanded. “And I mean it. It’s incredible, Hedwig, but it is true.”
“I want you to mean it,” Hedwig replied, moving close to him, so that her soft draperies brushed him; the very scent of the faint perfume she used was in the air he breathed. “I want you to, because Nikky, you are going to take me away, aren’t you?”
Then, because she dared not give him time to think, she made her plea,—rapid, girlish, rather incoherent, but understandable enough. They would go away together and be married. She had it all planned and some of it arranged. And then they would hide somewhere, and—“And always be together,” she finished, tremulous with anxiety.
And Nikky? His pulses still beating at her nearness, his eyes on her upturned, despairing young face, turned to him for hope and comfort, what could he do? He took her in his arms again and soothed her, while she cried her heart out against his tunic. He said he would do anything to keep her from unhappiness, and that he would die before he let her go to Karl’s arms. But if he had stopped thinking before, he was thinking hard enough then.
“To-night?” said Hedwig, raising a tear-stained face. “It is early. If we wait something will happen. I know it. They are so powerful, they can do anything.”
After all, Nikky is poor stuff to try to make a hero of. He was so human, and so loving. And he was very, very young, which may perhaps be his excuse. As well confess his weakness and his temptation. He was tempted. Almost he felt he could not let her go, could not loosen his hold of her. Almost—not quite.
He put her away from him at last, after he had kissed her eyelids and her forehead, which was by way of renunciation. And then he folded his arms, which were treacherous and might betray him. After that, not daring to look at her, but with his eyes fixed on the irregular sky-line of the city roofs, he told her many things, of his promise to the King, of the danger, imminent now and very real, of his word of honor not to make love to her, which he had broken.
Hedwig listened, growing cold and still, and drawing away a little. She was suffering too much to be just. All she could see was that, for a matter of honor, and that debatable, she was to be sacrificed. This danger that all talked of—she had heard that for a dozen years, and nothing had come of it. Nothing, that is, but her own sacrifice.
She listened, even assented, as he pleaded against his own heart, treacherous arms still folded. And if she saw his arms and not his eyes, it was because she did not look up.
Halfway through his eager speech, however, she drew her light wrap about her and turned away. Nikky could not believe that she was going like that, without a word. But when she had disappeared through the window, he knew, and followed her. He caught her in Hubert’s room, and drew her savagely into his arms.
But it was a passive, quiescent, and trembling Hedwig who submitted, and then, freeing herself, went out through the door into the lights of the corridor. Nikky flung himself, face down, on a shrouded couch and lay there, his face buried in his arms.
Olga Loschek’s last hope was gone.
On the day of the Carnival, which was the last day before the beginning of Lent, Prince Ferdinand William Otto wakened early. The Palace still slept, and only the street-sweepers were about the streets. Prince Ferdinand William Otto sat up in bed and yawned. This was a special day, he knew, but at first he was too drowsy to remember.
Then he knew—the Carnival! A delightful day, with the Place full of people in strange costumes—peasants, imps, jesters, who cut capers on the grass in the Park, little girls in procession, wearing costumes of fairies with gauze wings, students who paraded and blew noisy horns, even horses decorated, and now and then a dog dressed as a dancer or a soldier.
He would have enjoyed dressing Toto in something or other. He decided to mention it to Nikky, and with a child’s faith he felt that Nikky would, so to speak, come up to the scratch.
He yawned again, and began to feel hungry. He decided to get up and take his own bath. There was nothing like getting a good start for a gala day. And, since with the Crown Prince to decide was to do, which is not always a royal trait, he took his own bath, being very particular about his ears, and not at all particular about the rest of him. Then, no Oskar having yet appeared with fresh garments he ducked back into bed again, quite bare as to his small body, and snuggled down in the sheets.
Lying there, he planned the day. There were to be no lessons except fencing, which could hardly be called a lesson at all, and as he now knew the “Gettysburg Address,” he meant to ask permission to recite it to his grandfather. To be quite sure of it, he repeated it to himself as he lay there:—
“Free and equal,” he said to himself. That rather puzzled him. Of course people were free, but they did not seem to be equal. In the summer, at the summer palace, he was only allowed to see a few children, because the others were what his Aunt Annunciata called “bourgeois.” And there was in his mind also something Miss Braithwaite had said, after his escapade with the American boy.
“If you must have some child to play with,” she had said severely, “you could at least choose some one approximately your equal.”
“But he is my equal,” he had protested from the outraged depths of his small democratic heart.
“In birth,” explained Miss Braithwaite.
“His father has a fine business,” he had said, still rather indignant. “It makes a great deal of money. Not everybody can build a scenic railway and get it going right. Bobby said so.”
Miss Braithwaite had been silent and obviously unconvinced. Yet this Mr. Lincoln, the American, had certainly said that all men were free and equal. It was very puzzling.
But, as the morning advanced, as, clothed and fed, the Crown Prince faced the new day, he began to feel a restraint in the air. People came and went, his grandfather’s Equerry, the Chancellor, the Lord Chamberlain, other gentlemen, connected with the vast and intricate machinery of the Court, and even Hedwig, in a black frock, all these people came, and talked together, and eyed him when he was not looking. When they left they all bowed rather more than usual, except Hedwig, who kissed him, much to his secret annoyance.
Every one looked grave, and spoke in a low tone. Also there was something wrong with Nikky, who appeared not only grave, but rather stern and white. Considering that it was the last day before Lent, and Carnival time, Prince Ferdinand William Otto felt vaguely defrauded, rather like the time he had seen “The Flying Dutchman,” which had turned out to be only a make-believe ship and did not fly at all. To add to the complications, Miss Braithwaite had a headache.
Nikky Larisch had arrived just as Hedwig departed, and even the Crown Prince had recognized something wrong. Nikky had stopped just inside the doorway, with his eyes rather desperately and hungrily on Hedwig, and Hedwig, who should have been scolded, according to Prince Otto, had passed him with the haughtiest sort of nod.
The Crown Prince witnessed the nod with wonder and alarm.
“We are all rather worried,” he explained afterward to Nikky, to soothe his wounded pride. “My grandfather is not so well to-day. Hedwig is very unhappy.”
“Yes,” said Nikky miserably, “she does look unhappy.”
“Now, when are we going out?” briskly demanded Prince Ferdinand William Otto. “I can hardly wait. I’ve seen the funniest people already—and dogs. Nikky, I wonder if you could dress Toto, and let me see him somewhere.”
“Out! You do not want to go out in that crowd, do you?”
“Why—am I not to go?”
His voice was suddenly quite shaky. He was, in a way, so inured to disappointments that he recognized the very tones in which they were usually announced. So he eyed Nikky with a searching glance, and saw there the thing he feared.
“Well,” he said resignedly, “I suppose I can see something from the windows. Only—I should like to have a really good time occasionally.” He was determined not to cry. “But there are usually a lot of people in the Place.”
Then, remembering that his grandfather was very ill, he tried to forget his disappointment in a gift for him. Not burnt wood this time, but the drawing of a gun, which he explained as he worked, that he had invented. He drew behind the gun a sort of trestle, with little cars, not unlike the Scenic Railway, on which ammunition was delivered into the breech by something strongly resembling a coal-chute.
There was, after all, little to see from the windows. That part of the Place near the Palace remained empty and quiet, by order of the King’s physicians. And although it was Carnival, and the streets were thronged with people, there was little of Carnival in the air. The city waited.
Some loyal subjects waited and grieved that the King lay dying. For, although the Palace had carefully repressed his condition, such things leak out, and there was the empty and silent Place to bear witness.
Others waited, too, but not in sorrow. And a certain percentage, the young and light-hearted, strutted the streets in fantastic costume, blew horns and threw confetti and fresh flowers, still dewy from the mountain slopes. The Scenic Railway was crowded with merry-makers, and long lines of people stood waiting their turn at the ticket-booth, where a surly old veteran, pinched with sleepless nights, sold them tickets and ignored their badinage. Family parties, carrying baskets and wheeling babies in perambulators, took possession of the Park and littered it with paper bags. And among them, committing horrible crimes, dispatching whole families with a wooden gun from behind near-by trees and taking innumerable prisoners, went a small pirate in a black mask and a sash of scarlet ribbon, from which hung various deadly weapons, including a bread-knife, a meat-cleaver, and a hatchet.
Attempts to make Tucker wear a mask having proved abortive, he was attired in a pirate flag of black, worn as a blanket, and having on it, in white muslin, what purported to be a skull and cross-bones but which looked like the word “ox” with the “O” superimposed over the “X.”
Prince Ferdinand William Otto stood at his window and looked out. Something of resentment showed itself in the lines of his figure. There was, indeed, rebellion in his heart. This was a real day, a day of days, and no one seemed to care that he was missing it. Miss Braithwaite looked drawn about the eyes, and considered carnivals rather common, and certainly silly. And Nikky looked drawn about the mouth, and did not care to play.
Rebellion was dawning in the soul of the Crown Prince, not the impassive revolt of the “Flying Dutchman” and things which only pretended to be, like the imitation ship and the women who were not really spinning. The same rebellion, indeed, which had set old Adelbert against the King and turned him traitor, a rebellion against needless disappointment, a protest for happiness.
Old Adelbert, forbidden to march in his new uniform, the Crown Prince, forbidden his liberty and shut in a gloomy palace, were blood-brothers in revolt.
Not that Prince Ferdinand William Otto knew he was in revolt. At first it consisted only of a consideration of his promise to the Chancellor. But while there had been an understanding, there had been no actual promise, had there?
Late in the morning Nikky took him to the roof. “We can’t go out, old man,” Nikky said to him, rather startled to discover the unhappiness in the boy’s face, “but I’ve found a place where we can see more than we can here. Suppose we try it.”
“Why can’t we go out? I’ve always gone before.”
“Well,” Nikky temporized, “they’ve made a rule. They make a good many rules, you know. But they said nothing about the roof.”
“The roof!”
“The roof. The thing that covers us and keeps out the weather. The roof, Highness.” Nikky alternated between formality and the other extreme with the boy.
“It slants, doesn’t it?” observed his Highness doubtfully.
“Part of it is quite flat. We can take a ball up there, and get some exercise while we’re about it.”
As a matter of fact, Nikky was not altogether unselfish. He would visit the roof again, where for terrible, wonderful moments he had held Hedwig in his arms. On a pilgrimage, indeed, like that of the Crown Prince to Etzel, Nikky would visit his shrine.
So they went to the roof. They went through silent corridors, past quiet rooms where the suite waited and spoke in whispers, past the very door of the chamber where the Council sat in session, and where reports were coming in, hour by hour, as to the condition of things outside. Past the apartment of the Archduchess Annunciata, where Hilda, released from lessons, was trying the effect of jet earrings against her white skin, and the Archduchess herself was sitting by her fire, and contemplating the necessity for flight. In her closet was a small bag, already packed in case of necessity. Indeed, more persons than the Archduchess Annunciata had so prepared. Miss Braithwaite, for instance, had spent a part of the night over a traveling-case containing a small boy’s outfit, and had wept as she worked, which was the reason for her headache.
The roof proved quite wonderful. One could see the streets crowded with people, could hear the soft blare of distant horns.
“The Scenic Railway is in that direction,” observed the Crown Prince, leaning on the balustrade. “If there were no buildings we could see it.”
“Right here,” Nikky was saying to himself. “At this very spot. She held out her arms, and I—”
“It looks very interesting,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto. “Of course we can’t see the costumes, but it is better than nothing.”
“I kissed her,” Nikky was thinking, his heart swelling under his very best tunic. “Her head was on my breast, and I kissed her. Last of all, I kissed her eyes—her lovely eyes.”
“If I fell off here,” observed the Crown Prince in a meditative voice, “I would be smashed to a jelly, like the child at the Crystal Palace.”
“But now she hates me,” said Nikky’s heart, and dropped about the distance of three buttons. “She hates me. I saw it in her eyes this morning. God!”
“We might as well play ball now.”
Prince Ferdinand William Otto turned away from the parapet with a sigh. This strange quiet that filled the Palace seemed to have attacked Nikky too. Otto hated quiet.
They played ball, and the Crown Prince took a lesson in curves. But on his third attempt, he described such a compound—curve that the ball disappeared over an adjacent part of the roof, and although Nikky did some blood-curdling climbing along gutters, it could not be found.
It was then that the Majordomo, always a marvelous figure in crimson and gold, and never seen without white gloves—the Majordomo bowed in a window, and observed that if His Royal Highness pleased, His Royal Highness’s luncheon was served.
In the shrouded room inside the windows, however, His Royal Highness paused and looked around.
“I’ve been here before,” he observed. “These were my father’s rooms. My mother lived here, too. When I am older, perhaps I can have them. It would be convenient on account of my practicing curves on the roof. But I should need a number of balls.”
He was rather silent on his way back to the schoolroom. But once he looked up rather wistfully at Nikky.
“If they were living,” he said, “I am pretty sure they would take me out to-day.”
Olga Loschek had found the day one of terror. Annunciata had demanded her attendance all morning, had weakened strangely and demanded fretfully to be comforted.
“I have been a bad daughter,” she would say. “It was my nature. I was warped and soured by wretchedness.”
“But you have not been a bad daughter,” the Countess would protest, for the thousandth time. “You have done your duty faithfully. You have stayed here when many another would have been traveling on the Riviera, or—”
“It was no sacrifice,” said Annunciata, in her peevish voice. “I loathe traveling. And now I am being made to suffer for all I have done. He will die, and the rest of us—what will happen to us?” She shivered.
The Countess would take the cue, would enlarge on the precautions for safety, on the uselessness of fear, on the popularity of the Crown Prince. And Annunciata, for a time at least, would relax. In her new remorse she made frequent visits to the sickroom, passing, a long, thin figure, clad in black, through lines of bowing gentlemen, to stand by the bed and wring her hands. But the old King did not even know she was there.
The failure of her plan as to Nikky and Hedwig was known to the Countess the night before. Hedwig had sent for her and faced her in her boudoir, very white and calm.
“He refuses,” she said. “There is nothing more to do.”
“Refuses!”
“He has promised not to leave Otto.”
Olga Loschek had been incredulous, at first. It was not possible. Men in love did not do these things. It was not possible, that, after all, she had failed. When she realized it, she would have broken out in bitter protest, but Hedwig’s face warned her. “He is right, of course,” Hedwig had said. “You and I were wrong, Countess. There is nothing to do—or say.”
And the Countess had taken her defeat quietly, with burning eyes and a throat dry with excitement. “I am sorry, Highness,” she said from the doorway. “I had only hoped to save you from unhappiness. That is all. And, as you say, there is nothing to be done.” So she had gone away and faced the night, and the day which was to follow.
The plot was arranged, to the smallest detail. The King, living now only so long as it was decreed he should live; would, in mid-afternoon, commence to sink. The entire Court would be gathered in anterooms and salons near his apartments. In his rooms the Crown Prince would be kept, awaiting the summons to the throne-room, where, on the King’s death, the regency would be declared, and the Court would swear fealty to the new King, Otto the Ninth. By arrangement with the captain of the Palace guard, who was one of the Committee of Ten, the sentries before the Crown Prince’s door were to be of the revolutionary party. Mettlich would undoubtedly be with the King. Remained then to be reckoned with only the Prince’s personal servants, Miss Braithwaite, and Nikky Larisch.
The servants offered little difficulty. At that hour, four o’clock, probably only the valet Oskar would be on duty, and his station was at the end of a corridor, separated by two doors from the schoolroom. It was planned that the two men who were to secure the Crown Prince were to wear the Palace livery, and to come with a message that the Crown Prince was to accompany them. Then, instead of going to the wing where the Court was gathered, they would go up to Hubert’s rooms, and from there to the roof and the secret passage.
Two obstacles were left for the Countess to cope with, and this was her part of the work. She had already a plan for Miss Braithwaite. But Nikky Larisch?
Over that problem, during the long night hours, Olga Loschek worked. It would be possible to overcome Nikky, of course. There would be four men, with the sentries, against him. But that would mean struggle and an alarm. It was the plan to achieve the abduction quietly, so quietly that for perhaps an hour—they hoped for an hour—there would be no alarm. Some time they must have, enough to make the long journey through the underground passage. Otherwise the opening at the gate would be closed, and the party caught like rats in a hole.
The necessity for planning served one purpose, at least. It kept her from thinking. Possibly it saved her reason, for there were times during that last night when Olga Loschek was not far from madness. At dawn, long after Hedwig had forgotten her unhappiness in sleep, the Countess went wearily to bed. She had dismissed Minna hours before, and as she stood before her mirror, loosening her heavy hair, she saw that all that was of youth and loveliness in her had died in the night. A determined, scornful, and hard-eyed woman, she went drearily to bed.
During the early afternoon the Chancellor visited the Crown Prince. Waiting and watching had made inroads on him, too, but he assumed a sort of heavy jocularity for the boy’s benefit.
“No lessons, eh?” he said. “Then there have been no paper balls for the tutors’ eyes, eh?”
“I never did that but once, sir,” said Prince Ferdinand William Otto gravely.
“So! Once only!”
“And I did that because he was always looking at Hedwig’s picture.”
The Chancellor eyed the picture. “I should be the last to condemn him for that,” he said, and glanced at Nikky.
“We must get the lad out somewhere for some air,” he observed. “It is not good to keep him shut up like this.” He turned to the Crown Prince. “In a day or so,” he said, “we shall all go to the summer palace. You would like that, eh?”
“Will my grandfather be able to go?”
The Chancellor sighed. “Yes,” he said, “I—he will go to the country also. He has loved it very dearly.”
He went, shortly after three o’clock. And, because he was restless and uneasy, he made a round of the Palace, and of the guards. Before he returned to his vigil outside the King’s bedroom, he stood for a moment by a window and looked out. Evidently rumors of the King’s condition had crept out, in spite of their caution. The Place, kept free of murmurs by the police, was filling slowly with people; people who took up positions on benches, under the trees, and even sitting on the curb of the street. An orderly and silent crowd it seemed, of the better class. Here and there he saw police agents in plain clothes, impassive but watchful, on the lookout for the first cry of treason.
An hour or two, or three—three at the most and the fate of the Palace would lie in the hands of that crowd. He could but lead the boy to the balcony, and await the result.