[Cover Illustration]

=_By_ MARY ROBERTS RINEHART=

THE OUT TRAIL
THE BREAKING POINT
A POOR WISE MAN
DANGEROUS DAYS
THE AMAZING INTERLUDE
“K”
BAB: A SUB-DEB
TISH
MORE TISH
SIGHT UNSEEN AND THE CONFESSION
AFFINITIES AND OTHER STORIES
LOVE STORIES
KINGS, QUEENS AND PAWNS
TWENTY-THREE AND A HALF HOURS’ LEAVE
“ISN’T THAT JUST LIKE A MAN?”
ETC., ETC.

NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TEMPERAMENTAL
PEOPLE

BY
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1924,
By George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1914, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company

TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE
—B—
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

I PAGE HER MAJESTY, The Queen 9 II THE ALTAR ON THE HILL: The Secretary 60 III CYNARA: The Sculptor 103 IV THE GREAT SUCCESS: The Singer 123 V THE SECRET HOUSE: The Wife 154 VI A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy 182 VII LILY: The Philanderer 231 VIII “ÇA NE FAIT RIEN”: The Dough Boy 262

TEMPERAMENTAL PEOPLE

I
HER MAJESTY, The Queen

I

Of course it was all over when I knew them, and naturally I did not get all the story at once. There they would sit in that little upper room in Switzerland, the Queen sewing, or sometimes just sitting near the window looking at the mountain wall, always beautiful, always in the soft white wool habit, and Clotilde, the lady-in-waiting who had been her maid of honour, feeding the briquets into the tiled stove and feeling the big pitcher on top of it to see if the chill had left the water.

And Rudi, big and still handsome, perhaps trying to read, but really watching the Queen. He hated reading and he loved the Queen. She had been his religion and his creed for so long, poor Rudi. And perhaps he was not clever; only loyal and adoring, and rather tragic.

When he was not watching her he would be looking at his watch, if it were evening. And the Queen would say:

“What time is it now?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“Are you certain he is coming?”

“He said so.”

“Then he will come,” the Queen would say. And she would smooth more carefully the folds of the white gown, and Clotilde would get out the old ivory chess set with its inlays of gold and place it on the table.

The whole room would take on an air of waiting and of listening. Nobody spoke much. It was as if the ears and the minds of all three of them were turned toward the street and the passage below, waiting. And then, more often than not, we would hear Toto’s ringing step on the pavement and he would be coming up the stone staircase, brisk and young.

The Queen, Rudi, Clotilde, would watch the door until it opened and he came in.

All that great story behind them, and this its climax, that Toto should come in now and then in the evenings! That he should sit there, laughing his gay young laugh, and never know that to the other three his presence was the culmination of their lives.

Rudi and Toto at the table, with the lamplight on them, and the Queen in the shadows watching them both. And perhaps Rudi leaning back complacently and saying:

“You perceive, sir, that your king is in danger?”

“Danger! Egad, sir, he is lost!”

And the Queen watching them both, hungrily.

* * * * *

On those evenings Clotilde would slip away and come to my room. It was the least she could do, she felt—to give them that little time alone together. Not that she said this at first. It was only little by little that she told the story, knitting all the time at Rudi’s woollen stockings and unburdening herself at the cost, I always felt, of a certain feeling of disloyalty.

But it was rather a wonderful picture she drew: the roaring of great stags at night in the forest; the feudal life of the old castle on its mountain, where priceless old brocades and tapestries blew to rags in the wind from unmended windows; where a chamberlain lighted the family to bed at night, leading the way along dark and freezing stone passages. And where the Queen, a young girl then, shut off in a shabby nursery with an English “Mees” as a governess, made her own little muslin frocks by hand and was taught four languages.

In the evenings she was brought down to the cold salon and made to play the piano for an hour while the old Duke dozed in a chair with a deerskin over his knees, and her mother listened and criticised.

“She always played very badly at those times,” said Clotilde. “Her hands were so cold and she was always frightened.”

Then, it seems, there was a half-hour’s formal conversation in one of the four languages, the grim Archduchess sitting and the little Princess standing, and after that came the chamberlain, and so to bed.

The gloom lifted a little when Clotilde came to be her maid of honour. And it lifted still further when Rudi was placed on the castle guard, the officers of which were recruited from the lesser nobility. But outside of his sixteen quarterings, whatever that may be, Rudi had exactly his good looks, six uniforms—the dress ones of white breeches, blue tunic laced with gold and high patent leather boots—one horse, a boarhound and his pay. That is, he was supposed to have his pay. The old Archduke held out on him more often than not.

So far, you see, it is quite the usual story. But even here it has its points. There was the night, for instance, after the Archduke had held a boar hunt, when the Archduchess retired in fury to her chamber and the hunting party got vastly tight. When the old Duke was safely asleep a young sprig of royalty who was with the party offered to show them a sleeping beauty upstairs and about a dozen of them started up to the Princess’s door.

“We were awake,” said Clotilde. “And we heard them coming. But the lock on the door would not work. And then we heard Rudi outside the door.”

Rudi, it seems, had nothing but a poker from the fire in the great hall, but he took up his position with it.

“Over my dead body, gentlemen!” he said rather cheerfully. He seems always to have loved a fight.

If he had on the white breeches and the blue tunic he must have been rather a fine sight, poker or no poker. And so they sneaked away again and were found the next morning asleep in all sorts of places.

“One was under the piano,” said Clotilde.

The Duke gave Rudi the back pay that was coming to him as a reward and wrote to the King about it.

“If he had never written that letter— You see, it brought her to the King’s attention. There are times, my dear, when it is best not to be brought to a king’s attention.”

And undeniably this was one of the times. Rudi and the Princess were desperately in love. Desperately and fairly hopelessly. One can imagine the state of affairs had Rudi gone to the Duke and said to him: “Sir, I desire to confer on your daughter my sixteen quarterings, six uniforms, one horse and a boar hound.”

The Princess was not sleeping at night, nor Clotilde either, and Rudi would prowl around under the windows, trying probably to pretend he was a deer, and watching for the last gleam of candlelight. And at first the Princess had thought it was Clotilde he cared for and had been quite despairing.

“But it was not me he cared for,” said Clotilde, and bent a little lower over Rudi’s woollen stocking. “It was always—the Queen.”

Sometimes I have wondered about that little middle-aged lady-in-waiting. Just what went on in her heart so long ago? What has carved the little tragic lines of repression in her cameo-like face? Just what thoughts and memories and thwartings go into those interminable stockings?

There is a photograph of Rudi in his zenith on her little chest of drawers, and once on his name day I found her burning a candle before it.

II

Up to that time nothing had been said between the lovers. In Rudi’s position it was not for him to make the first move, and the Princess was shy and uncertain. Then the King’s letter bore its first fruits, in the shape of a stout little gentleman “with pigs’ eyes.”

The Princess had been hastily put into a muslin dress with a pink sash and taken in to see him, and he had talked to her for a few minutes, appraising her all the time. She had got so nervous that she had dropped her tea-cup. The Archduchess had scolded her frightfully about it later.

“But she did not know what it was all about,” said Clotilde. “Rudi was in attendance and he suspected something, but we did not.”

I think Clotilde herself suspected Rudi of what followed. For going back to the railroad, down the mountain, the big berlin carrying the King’s envoy upset and threw the little gentleman out. There was a great to-do about it at the castle, but the beans were spilled, so to speak, and there was nothing to be done.

And within a day or two Rudi, who had had a bad fright, declared himself. The English “Mees” had a bad cold and the old people were away for the day. Rudi, it seems, simply marched up to the old schoolroom, threw open the door and stalked in. He looked first at the Princess and then at Clotilde.

“Will you allow me a moment alone with the Princess?” he said.

Clotilde got up, curtsied and went out. As she closed the door she heard Rudi, still stalking apparently, cross the room and say in a loud and desperate voice:

“If you tell me to go I shall go—by the window!”

As the window, although over a cliff, was really a sort of narrow feudal slit for archers, and as Rudi was extremely big, there seems to have been little danger. Anyhow, it was apparently not necessary for him to make the attempt. When Clotilde went back, hearing no voices, she found them in each other’s arms.

“And then?”

“I did not see much of them for a week or so. I was taken ill. But they were very happy. Like children, not looking ahead. Just—happy.”

And she had been ill! Lying in her shabby stone-floored room, with its tapestry over the door to keep out the draft, and picturing them together. Having the Princess come in now and then, glorified, to talk of Rudi. And even Rudi tiptoeing in clandestinely to press her hand and thank her. Ill, indeed.

Nothing more had been heard of the little man with the pigs’ eyes except a profound apology for the accident from the Duke and a rather irritable acceptance of it. It began to look as if the King’s eyes had been turned elsewhere for a wife, and the Duchess was most unamiable.

Then one day a photographer came to the castle and took a great many photographs of the Princess, sitting and standing, sideways and full face.

“She had a new frock for it,” said Clotilde. “The Archduchess’s maid made it. It was white tulle looped with rosebuds, and they gave her the little string of pearls she wears now. It was her first décolleté, and she was very self-conscious. But so beautiful, my dear!”

Then things began to move rather fast. Came an Ambassadress to spend a week-end.

“A terrible woman,” said Clotilde. “Tall and thin, in a red velvet draped over a green plaid. Worth had just introduced the bustle and the enormous back drapery over it, and she could only sit on the edge of a chair.”

Well, there had been a gala dinner at four in the afternoon and a ball that night, and the Ambassadress, always from the edge of her chair, watched the Princess through her pince-nez.

“She dances sweetly,” she said. “Also she has manner. Very much manner, for one so young.”

The Archduchess was extremely gratified and content, even though her own back drapery had sunk into insignificance beside the visitor’s.

The hunt was fairly in the open now, and Rudi was almost frenzied. That night after the ball, when Clotilde went back to her room, she found him there, his sabre and helmet flung on her bed, and Rudi pacing the floor.

“I was greatly alarmed,” she said. “So much gossip went on in the castle always. And then it was old and the floor boards creaked. I could hear him long before I got to my door.”

It is a curious picture; the Ambassadress and the Archduchess being disrobed somewhere, their partures being taken off—the Archduchess had had one reset for the occasion—the tight Worth dresses, so heavy that their maids could hardly lift them, being hung away, and their wearers silently plotting, dreaming; the Princess herself, too trained to submission to resist them all, perhaps standing at her window with the tulle and rosebud frock flung anywhere; and Rudi in Clotilde’s room, not caring if he roused the castle, and loudly demanding of the girl who loved him that she help him to the girl he loved.

Of course there was no answer. Clotilde, it seems, was as ignorant of the world and its ways as the Princess.

“We had been so sheltered,” she said in her quiet voice. “I had never been out on a street alone in my life. And young women were not supposed to think. A serious-minded girl had no hope of marriage in those days. Although we had heard that”—she smiled a little—“Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis.”

She had, it seems, been rather frightened at Rudi, so hot at first, so dogged toward the end. And he said the most frightful things about the King at the top of his voice. “Things one does not speak about,” she explained, “although they were probably true.”

Much of that, I gather, went over Clotilde’s head at the time, for she and the Princess were entirely innocent. But Rudi of course was not, and the idea of selling this pearl of his into any sort of impurity had quite maddened him.

It was almost dawn when he went away. And——

“He had forgotten his sword,” she said. “When he had gone I found it lying on my bed. I hid it in my closet and a maid found it there the next day and somehow it got about. I had a really dreadful time.”

But it did one bit of good. It convinced the Archduchess that Rudi was only interested in Clotilde. She had been rather suspicious. “So long as you are here,” she said contemptuously to Clotilde, “you will not receive young men in your bedroom. After the Princess’s marriage you can go where you will and do what you like. Sell yourself or give yourself away. It is nothing to me. But until then——”

She made a rather dreadful gesture, not improved by her appearance, and Clotilde went away.

“It was bedtime,” Clotilde said, “and the Ambassadress had told her the Viennese ladies were sleeping in masks of fresh veal to improve their complexions; she was trying it.”

She was hoping, you see, after all the lean years, to go back to court again. But one can see the old Archduke, who loved a pretty woman, coming to the door of his wife’s bedroom that night and there confronting that horrible mask!

When the ambassadress went away, still in the brown Swedish gloves without which she had never been seen during the visit, it was certain that she would return a favourable report to the King. But she said a few pertinent words to the Archduchess before she left.

“She is sweetly pretty and—virginal,” she said. “But for Heaven’s sake, madame, get her some clothes. Get Worth up here, or have him send somebody.”

The Archduchess was mean about money; and she demurred.

“It is her very simplicity——”

“Fiddlesticks!” said the Ambassadress, or its equivalent. “Keep her simple, of course, but dress her. And”—she glanced at Clotilde, who was present, and lowered her voice—“get rid of that handsome what’s his name.”

“I am not worried about Rudi,” said the Archduchess, and curled her lip. She knew what she knew.

So the Ambassadress went away, carrying on her lap a new bonnet she had never had a chance to wear in that forsaken spot, and sitting well forward in the berlin to save her drapery. And somehow or other the Princess seems to have thought the affair had blown over. But not Clotilde.

“I knew,” she said. “Who would not, with King’s messengers coming and going and with Worth sending people to measure her for clothes! Such clothes, my dear! And how lovely she looked in them!”

Young unmarried women in those days, it appears, were forbidden the satins and velvets of their elders, but Worth made her lovely things as dainty and airy as herself. She had a frock of pink tulle, looped with festoons of white camellias and a white ball gown embroidered in seed pearls. And since she rode beautifully, there was a riding costume of dark blue, so tight that she had to be sewed into it every time she put it on. The tailor from the village came up to do it.

“And Rudi knew,” Clotilde said. “He was like a madman with me; with her, of course, he was all gentleness. But his eyes seemed sunk in his head and I think he slept very little.”

They managed to meet, of course. The Princess would take a book of poems and wander out into the woods—with Clotilde—and Rudi would be there. And then Clotilde would wander off by herself and leave them alone together.

“It was rather dull for you.”

“I always took some embroidery, my dear.”

But I wonder how much she sewed? I wonder if she did not, now and then, lie face down on the fallen leaves and fight back her own sorrow.

Gradually, too, the little Princess began to get frightened. They were doing over the royal suite, for one thing, and Clotilde particularly described the bedroom.

I think the dear soul still regarded it as exquisite. It appeared that the walls were sea-green, the furniture freshly gilded, a new Brussels carpet was laid down, and all the pictures had bows of yellow ribbon surmounting them.

The Princess began to be shadowed under the eyes, and when they were fitting on the new frocks she was rather frozen. And one day Clotilde, coming back to them in the woods, found Rudi’s head buried in her lap, and the Princess, with a new and older look in her eyes, smoothing his bright hair.

“They were so helpless,” she said. “We all were. They could not even run away. No priest would have married them. And what made it worse was not knowing what was going on. Nobody told her anything. All they could do was to wait.”

Then came word that the King would visit the Duke, coming more or less incognito. But as he brought four of his gentlemen, each with a servant, and four valets, the accommodations of the shabby old palace were pretty well taxed.

III

The King, after he had got his face washed, turned out to be not unprepossessing, although he was a little man and not young. At first, when he stepped out onto the usual red carpet laid at the station he had looked rather like an undersized chimney-sweep, and he had seemed rather bored.

“But he brightened up when he saw her,” said Clotilde. “I don’t mean that he ever loved her—he had somebody else, I believe—but since he had to marry, he must have felt that he was fortunate.”

Just what he thought of his suite nobody knows. He stood it for three days anyhow, hunting part of the time, with the Princess taking fences that endangered the royal neck, all sewed into her habit as she was, and Rudi undoubtedly setting a pace and praying for a casualty. But the King was game, although he sat down with great care in the evenings.

And on the evening of the third day he got down to business, in the old Archduke’s study. Things were not going as well as they should. The revolutionary party was at his heels, and he needed a good healthy rallying point for public sentiment.

“Such as—”

“Such as an heir,” said the King.

The Archduke, I believe, stated that both he and the Archduchess came of fertile stock.

“Yet you have had but the one child,” said the King.

“One may be childless without being sterile, sire,” said the Archduke dryly, and flicked a glance at his wife’s portrait over the fireplace.

They came to some sort of agreement finally and sent for the girl. And while they were waiting one of the King’s gentlemen brought in a leather case and put it on the desk. It lay there, unopened, when the Princess came in.

The Archduchess herself had overseen her dressing that night. They had put a net studded with pearls over her fair hair, and she wore the white dress trimmed with seed pearls. She had begged for a scarf to cover her arms and shoulders, for there was very little of the bodice, but the Archduchess had grimly refused. She had become a shop-woman showing the wares she had for sale.

Maybe something tugged at the Archduke’s heart-strings when he saw her, for he was rather gentle for once, and he took her by the arm.

“His Majesty has done us—done you—the great honour of asking for your hand in marriage,” he said.

“I have no wish to marry,” she said, frozen cold.

“Tut, tut!” said the Archduke. “The timidity of a young girl, sire.” And he closed his hand on her arm until she almost fainted. The King’s eyes narrowed.

“We will not hurry you,” he said with a little smile. “To-morrow, perhaps—”

The leather case still lay there unopened when they sent her out of the room. Later came the ball, and as if things were not bad enough already, when the ballroom doors were thrown open it was found that the candles in the great crystal chandeliers had melted from too much heat, and there were piles of wax stalagmites on the floor.

Sometime between night and the next morning the Princess agreed.

“What else could she do?” Clotilde said. “They gave her her choice of that or of going into a convent. And she was so young, only seventeen.”

The next day the leather case was opened and the King put over her head the great black pearl necklace in which Di Bicci later painted his famous portrait of her, swathed in rose tulle with the pearls a smoky grey rope that fell almost to her knees.

“She was like a dead creature,” Clotilde said. “But even then she believed Rudi would find some way out. But even Rudi failed her just then. Oh, only for a few hours, but it was almost more than she could bear.”

Rudi was only out trying to get himself killed. He was a good Catholic and he did not believe in suicide, but he had seen the pearls on her neck and he clearly perceived that she had, so to speak, sold him out. When he came back safe—damnably safe—Clotilde went to him with a message and he told her to go where he had been trying to go all day.

It was, one realises, not an original situation to that point; the usual arranged marriage of the courts, with a hot-eyed lover somewhere in the offing and a Princess who cries herself to sleep at night. Most of the Queens of Europe went from tears to tiaras and seemed to manage very comfortably thereafter. And after all, as has been said before, “Après la sainte cérémonie tout est permis.”

But from this point the tale varies.

The King hunted and made a little love, mostly apparently to Clotilde, whom he waylaid in upper corridors and kissed every so often, and Rudi went to confession to shrive his soul for his thought against the King and brought away a trifle of information.

“My son,” said the old priest, “between a crown and a convent, what girl of seventeen would choose the church?”

Rudi apparently digested that and then went home to study the situation. And I am quite sure, although Clotilde doubts it, that it was Rudi who planned the night visit to the Gipsy encampment. It does not sound entirely spontaneous. However that may be, it is certain that on the third and last evening of the King’s visit the entire party made an excursion to the camp not far away in an oak wood.

The Gipsies seem to have been a sad lot, living in caves, with the children naked and all of them screaming and holding out their hands for money. But the King was not squeamish and insisted on going underground. The Archduke tore his beard, no doubt, but he had to follow, and he came out later on holding his nose.

But that is not important. What does matter is that in the darkness Rudi and the Princess slipped away and were married by the Gipsy chief. A Gipsy marriage, of course, but to each of them it was a real one. Rudi never accepted any other version on it.

“It was not a real marriage in the eyes of the church, of course. But they had taken certain vows in the presence of witnesses, and of course, to them—”

They had been married “over the tongs” and the only real ceremony apparently they had conducted themselves; just taking each other for better or for worse. The Gipsies seem to have constituted witnesses mainly, and local colour. There was a man with the Princess’s handkerchief on a pole as a symbol of purity, and another sawing away violently on a fiddle, and all around were the dark-skinned women who resembled the lilies of the field only insomuch as they neither toiled, spun nor washed.

“The Gipsies thought it was a great joke, but—” Her voice trailed off. It was a moment before she resumed her sewing.

“I don’t know how you feel about it,” she said. “But when two people love like that and go through a ceremony of marriage before God, it is marriage, I think. And if you had seen their faces you would have felt as I did, that it was consecrated.”

Before the King left he had formally proposed for the Princess and the Duke had accepted. He went away, red carpet again, special train and everything, including his four gentlemen, his gentlemen’s valets and his own four. The bows were thriftily taken off the pictures, the new Brussels carpet had a dust cloth laid over it and a new era set in the old palace.

Instead of coming down now in the evenings to play the piano and be interrogated, the Princess was carefully instructed in the etiquette of the court.

“Again and again,” said Clotilde, “her mother would make her enter the room. She taught her to sit, to rise—no play was ever so rehearsed.”

She went through with it, poor lamb, waiting all the time for Rudi to perfect his plans for flight; stood while her gowns were fitted to her, so tight that she could scarcely breathe and so heavy that she wilted under them. Messengers arrived bringing the King’s gifts to her. A complete toilet service of gold and ivory was one of them, but she would never use it.

And then, on the day the date of the wedding was set and the Archduke sent for her to tell her, Rudi was thrown from his horse and broke his leg.

Everything was gone in a minute.

She had only just got the word when she was sent for. Clotilde was with her and she said:

“This is the end.”

She went down the great marble staircase, hung with its Gombaut and Macée tapestries, now in the French museum at Sainte Lô, and went into the library. There she stood, very white and trembling, while she was told.

“The date,” said the Duke, “is such and such.”

“I am sorry, father,” she said, very composed now, “I should have told you before, but—”

“But what?” said the Duke, suddenly rigid.

“I am already married.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have told you. I have married Rudi.”

Even to Clotilde I believe the Princess never told exactly what followed. There seems to have been no noise, for there were people about, in anterooms and corridors. And for the Archduke’s excuse there is the fact that he had been about to ally himself with one of the strong kingdoms and that he needed such alliance.

But the fact remains that the Princess was carried to her room sometime later with a dislocated wrist, and that it still has the faintest possible distortion. When she was allowed to get about again, under rigid supervision, Rudi had been carried off somewhere, and later on he was sent to Africa to join a regiment there.

There never really had been a hope for them.

IV

So she married the King, being taken to him of course in a special train, and having to wear evening dress in it, although it was mid-afternoon, and bowing from the window at the cheering crowds with a forced little smile, and her swollen wrist covered with a band of tulle.

Her frock, Clotilde said, was of rose brocade shot with gold, but what with the open window and the train dust it was quite ruined by the time they arrived. The open window gave her a moment’s hope, at first. But there never was a chance to leap through it and so bring everything to a quick termination.

The Archduchess never took her eyes off her.

But even then, remember, she had no idea of the real extent of the catastrophe.

She only knew that Rudi was gone and that the church did not recognise that she had contracted any marriage with him.

“She had not even a photograph of him,” said Clotilde. “He had given her that one”—she glanced at the one on the chest of drawers—“but they took it from her. Later on I managed to get it, and I have had it ever since.”

So she was married. She had, according to Clotilde, a marvellous trousseau; a hundred fine chemises, for instance, made by hand by the peasants, and all her dresses came from Worth. There was one of rose-coloured velvet with trimmings of silver fringe that required two maids to hold while she got into it.

But there was nobody to hold the burden she carried in her heart.

So she was married again. She dragged her heavy brocade of silver and white up the aisle of the royal chapel amid that glittering crowd of jewelled and stiffly rustling women and men, and swore to do her duty by God and her King. She meant to do that. She could not love the King, but she could be loyal and faithful. And, although it was rather like murder, she could kill the thought of Rudi. Or she thought she could. But she fainted after the ceremony.

“What about Rudi?” I asked. “Didn’t he know what was going on?”

“Not until it was too late.”

He got there the next day and tried to get an audience with the King. But they kept him out, and it is doubtful if the King, from first to last, ever identified Rudi at all.

I think Rudi would have killed him that day had he seen him.

But what would have been the use? She was the Queen then; she had already faced the dreadful ritual of a royal wedding night, been undressed by her strange ladies-in-waiting, and after the King had joined her been locked in by a high official and the keys taken away.

Rudi stayed for a week, but he never even saw her, and then went on to his lonely station in Africa. He was twenty-four, and he took back the streak of snow-white hair the width of two fingers which still gives him such an odd distinction. The Queen’s father and mother left too, the old Archduke to exercise the droit de seignor over any pretty peasant girl who took his fancy and the Archduchess to write those exultant letters to various royal relatives throughout Europe, copies of which have recently appeared in various memoirs.

“She made a quite lovely bride,” she wrote in one of them to the Queen of Sweden. “So composed and still.” Still indeed! Frozen to the very marrow of her! “She went a little faint after the ceremony, but was soon her bright and happy self again.”

And in another:

“She is taking her new responsibilities very seriously, as is proper. Her confessor tells me that she spends some time each day in the chapel, at prayer. A habit, he suggests, which might be emulated to advantage by the court.”

It was dawning on her, you see; the trap was closing and she had nobody to confide in except God. They had sent Clotilde away. She had not enough quarterings, for one thing, and for another, they had always suspected her of collusion with Rudi.

This may provide a key for that other cryptic letter, written some time later by the Archduchess to the English governess, who had more or less been in the secret, and recently published in her autobiography:

“We have at last got rid of C——. Thank God! She has, I hear, gone to Africa for the benefit of her health! As R—— W—— is there, one understands, I think. I can wish neither of them a greater misery than to marry the other, but it might be a desirable solution, and at least final.”

Clotilde has never mentioned that letter to me.

It was all over, apparently. The Queen was settled in her apartment at the palace. Her drawing room was white, a cold room, but not colder or whiter than the young Queen herself. Her dining room was next, a lofty circular room of red marble and black columns, and there the King dined with her occasionally, but less and less often as the weeks went by.

“He liked gaiety, you see,” said Clotilde, “and she could not be gay, although she tried. She puzzled him, I think. After a while he grew morose and when the meal was over he used to lean back and watch her. Not talking, you know. Just watching. Then, if she trembled, it irritated him.”

And around these two the stealthy life of the court, watching and whispering; maids of honour, courtiers, ushers, lackeys. All the ancient panoply, plush and gewgaws and curtsies and hand-kissing; the King with a private exit by which he slipped out to lead his secret man’s life, and the Queen under increasing espionage, and by that time carrying her dreadful secret.

She turned to the church for comfort and at last she confessed to her private chaplain.

“He was aghast,” said Clotilde. “He seems not to have known what to do. He prayed all of one night before the altar—an old man, too—and in the end he told her not to tell the King.”

One can see that old priest, too, I think, stretched on the cold stones and later going perhaps to his bishop. Heads together, weighing as well as praying; the very survival of the state perhaps at stake, and two old men divided between their God and their country.

And the King, disappointed and suspicious of he knew not what. A little man, vain and arrogant, accustomed to reach out and take what he wanted, and now finding that the spirit of this simple girl was as elusive as before he married her. Even jealous of the fact that her slim height made him seem shorter. Made him, if one can understand, a little less the King.

“He always walked a step or so ahead of her and it made her feel very awkward and very alone,” said Clotilde.

On gala evenings, then, the brilliant assembly: women in satins and brocades—the tiny waists, sharply defined busts and heavy draperies of the period—hung with jewels, watching and waiting; men in uniforms and orders; the famous throne-room with its great paintings and its dozen of glittering crystal chandeliers; and then the Groom of the Chambers throwing wide the doors and the entrance of the royal party, the King, small, cold and suspicious, just a little ahead of the Queen!

And somewhere in Africa Rudi staring at the northern stars.

It was after such a night that the Queen fainted again, falling with a crash against her enormous dressing-table, laden with glittering glass and gold, and receiving the little triangular scar on her forehead which she still tries to cover with her soft hair.

And soon after that it was announced to the King by the court physicians that the Queen would bear him a child.

It is impossible to convey the delicacy with which Clotilde told me that this expected heir to the throne, so loudly heralded, so politically vital, was not the King’s child, but Rudi’s. . . .

“If she had only let me know!” Clotilde said. “You see, I went to Africa that winter and I—saw Rudi. I could have told him and we might have thought of something. I believe she asked for me, but the King did not approve of my coming to her.”

Perhaps it is not fair to read between the lines. Perhaps Clotilde did go to Africa because of “trouble in her chest.” But I think she went out of a great hunger, to see Rudi again. Why not? After all, the Queen was lost to him, and he was young. They were all so pitifully young.

But Rudi was changed.

“He was very thin,” she said, “and so bitter! I cannot tell you how bitter. And he seemed somehow to have turned against me too. I only saw him once.” She hesitated. “No, I saw him twice, my dear. Why should I not tell you that? It is all so long ago, and I think he was a little mad at that time.”

It seems, then, that she saw Rudi at the hotel one morning, where he had come from his post out in the desert. He seemed to have been brooding, and he would not hear the Queen’s name at all.

“He had been too much alone, with the natives,” Clotilde explained. “He wasn’t even very tidy and—he had been drinking, I think.”

But there was no doubt that he had been drinking later on. Toward evening she received a scrawl from him telling her to come to a certain little square in the native quarter that night and receive a message for the Queen. She went, accompanied by her maid, and they found the square filled with howling, singing and dancing men and women, and in a cleared space, between two beating drums, Rudi sitting cross-legged on a mat.

His eyes were bloodshot and he had a lamp and a candle burning in front of him.

Clotilde edged her way near him and said clearly: “You are to come back with me, Rudi. Back to the hotel. This is no place for you.”

“It’s a good place. A damn fine place,” he said thickly.

“But you have a message for her, haven’t you?” she coaxed.

“I had a message, but I forget it,” he muttered. “Ah, yes!” He waved a hand at the frenzied crowd. “This is the message. Go back and tell her of my marriage feast. It may lack the resplendence of hers, but it has its points. It has its points.”

And at that moment a huge black woman decked out in silver bangles and beads came out of a house, followed by a crowd of yelling women, and came toward him.

The drums blared and the people shrieked with laughter. Clotilde turned away sick at heart, and made her way back to the hotel. But before she got there Rudi had followed her and caught her by the arm. He was not drunk any longer.

“If you tell her that I’ll kill you,” he said.

“Where’s your woman?”

“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “I never saw her before.”

He made no further explanation. At the hotel he got his horse, and the last she saw of him he was riding hell for leather down the narrow street and toward the desert.

V

It is curious to see how the old Archduke played his part in the story and went on, ignorant that he had contributed to it. But he had left his mark on the child and that had its consequences.

“You remember that he had hurt her severely in his anger,” said Clotilde. “Men think their evil deeds die with them, my dear, but they do not. When the baby came it had the red imprint of his fingers on its wrist—oh, very distinct. If you were to look now—”

But otherwise this heir to the throne, prematurely born seven months after the royal marriage, was quite beautiful.

“A true love-child,” Clotilde said gently. “Have you noticed that? One can always tell the babies born in love, I think.”

And its birth changed two people.

The King, who was one of them, became quite a different person. He scarcely left the Queen’s bed-chamber for the first three days. He would come in, send away the nuns and the ladies who happened to be in attendance, and sit by her great bed for an hour at a time. Not talking. Just watching her and the child, and sometimes going to the window and gazing out complacently at the bunting and flags which draped the public square before the palace in honour of the event.

He seemed at least a foot taller at that time, too.

But it had also changed the Queen. Up to that time she had been rather like a dazed child, trapped by forces she did not even understand. But the birth had turned her into a woman.

“It does that, you see,” Clotilde explained. “Have you noticed it, my dear? Even the expression of the face is often changed.”

The more gentle he was with her the more she felt the wickedness, priest or no priest, of going on with it. But she prayed fairly steadily to die so she need not tell him.

“I think,” the King would say, judicially, surveying the infant, “that he will favour my side of the family,” or words to that effect. And all the time she could see Rudi in him; Rudi’s bent little finger, Rudi’s bright hair, Rudi’s square jaw and even the promise of Rudi’s height. He was a “long” baby.

Apparently it never entered her head not to tell him. Out of this new maturity of hers had come the conclusion that none of them could go on living a lie. She would take the child and go away somewhere, anywhere, so long as she had the boy. Perhaps they could find Rudi, and after the King had divorced her—

Strange to think how little, after all that time, she knew the King. How she failed to consider the monstrous vanity of the man. For she waited three days trying to get strength for the ordeal, and then it was too late.

It was on the third day that the great public rejoicing took place. The town and the kingdom was in carnival, and in the afternoon there was a military procession with the booming of cannon from the fortress. Then the troops were drawn up in front of the palace, and the King, in uniform and wearing all his orders, carried the baby out onto a balcony while the bands played the national hymn.

It was when the King came back in, flushed with triumph, and placed the child beside her, that she found the courage to tell him.

“He stood by the bed and listened,” Clotilde said. “The crowds outside were still cheering and the bands playing. She thought he was going to kill her, and she kept the child close to her for fear he might hurt it. But he never even spoke. When she had finished he turned and went out without a word.”

No hand will ever penetrate the veil of the next few hours. The King, Clotilde has somehow learned, shut himself into his library alone at first, and one can fancy him there, pacing the floor and stopping now and then to glance over the place, still filled with carnival figures, pierrots and pierrettes dancing, grotesque papier-mâché animals on floats, banners, confetti. Even little dogs in ballet frills.

All the rejoicing going on, and he, the King, a cuckold.

Later he got in the court physicians and the Prime Minister, and sometime that night the old Archduke was located at his hunting lodge, and brought to the palace in his hunting clothes and a state of wild alarm.

“Two days later,” Clotilde said in her quiet voice, “the court physicians announced that the Queen’s condition was not satisfactory, and it was whispered about the court that her mind was affected. Within a month they took her to the summer palace in the mountains, and later she was sent, carefully guarded, to Italy. By that time all of Europe believed that she was permanently—not sane.”

But the King kept the child.

One can see his problem, I think. The cheers of his subjects still ringing in his ears; the sight of him with his heir, proud and exultant on his balcony, still fresh in their minds. And as he frantically paced his library, the issue growing clearer. He could kill the child or put him away, and that must have been his first thought, or with the assistance of Rome he could annul the marriage and marry again. But that meant a declaration of his own infamous situation, and his pride rebelled.

He compromised in the end, as better men had done before him. His throne was not too secure at the best; already were symptoms of the revolt which later overwhelmed him. The possession of an heir gave him strategic advantage.

And he may have believed her not sane. Her very confession, so suicidal, so inexplicable from any point of view but her own, must have seemed almost irrational. Indeed, Clotilde says she believes he would have discredited the story entirely, laid it to one of those temporary manias which occasionally follow childbirth, had not the chief court physician, after dutifully insisting that the child was premature, gone off and blown out his brains.

But whatever he may have believed or known, he did the one thing the girl queen had never anticipated, sent her away and kept her child. But always he hated him.

Clotilde has a confidential letter, written to her by an English governess when Toto, as he was familiarly called, was six.

“He is very bright and active,” she wrote. “But so lonely. Once a day he sees the King, but only for a few minutes. And I think his Majesty is rather severe; the discipline is military, and he has more to learn than is good for so young a child. However—”

VI

Clotilde had gone back to her father’s shabby old castle, and her first knowledge of the tragedy was through a visit from the Archduchess. She stalked in, long, lank and grey of face. Dirty, too, for she had travelled six hours by post-chaise, urging the coachman until the horses almost dropped. She put Clotilde’s mother out of the room with a gesture and confronted the frightened girl.

“You!” she said. “You wanton! Wantons both of you, living your dirty little lives under my roof!”

“No, madame,” Clotilde stammered. “I assure you—”

Great ladies sometimes allow themselves very coarse speech, and the Archduchess launched into quite imprintable language. In the end, however, she stalked to a mirror, straightened her bonnet with a jerk, and without waiting for a bell to be rung, went to the door.

“From now on,” she said, “I have no daughter. She can die and rot. I shall never recognise her again.”

And she did not.

She died two years later, leaving the Archduke surprisingly disconsolate. Clotilde, hearing she was dying, tried to see her beforehand to have her rescind that bitter ultimatum.

“But when I got there it was over,” she said. “She was lying in the chapel, very majestic, with a pall of purple velvet and ermine laid over her and six of her ladies keeping vigil, all in long black veils and holding candles. I relieved one of them who was faint and I had to stand perfectly still for six hours.”

One can see Clotilde standing there, I think, the light from the candles flickering on the dead woman’s white face, and Clotilde’s mind hopelessly circling; Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. A cold air numbing her, her veil stirring, the candles flickering and—Rudi, the queen, the child, the dead woman. Over and over.

There may have been just a bit of hope still in her heart at that time. The lovers were so hopelessly separated, and Rudi was still young and vital. She would fight it back, of course. She may only have prayed as she stood there for surcease of suffering. So many women pray, not for happiness but for an end of misery. But to stand there and think that this was the end all must reach, and not even hope to live before dying.

Later on she wrote to Rudi.

“But he had heard of the Queen’s malady and he was very ill in a hospital. Somehow or other the letter never reached him.”

She does not say, but I rather think Rudi was under pretty careful espionage at the time. The wonder is that they let him live. However that may be, the failure of Rudi to reply gave the last blow to Clotilde’s always faint hope.

She made the only decision she felt was possible and chose the gentlewoman’s retreat from the sorrows of the world. She entered a convent.

“I do not know that I had any vocation,” she said thoughtfully. “But I had lived through a great deal and I wanted peace. Perhaps it was not a worthy motive.” Her voice lapsed for a moment. “But you see, I took my troubles in with me and there was too much time to think.”

Toward the end of her novitiate, however, she seems to have attained a sort of peace. Certainly by the time she emerged she had almost achieved that selflessness which has carried her on ever since. For she did emerge.

That in itself is a story. One can see how this narrative becomes a series of small scenes like a play, each leading on with a certain inevitability to the next, and all of them to that quiet curtain of the chess game in the sitting room, and to what, that night, was to follow.

There was a nun in the convent, a Sister Maria. Clotilde often found her watching her, and now and then they talked. Then one night Sister Maria came to her cell.

“I cannot sleep,” said the Sister. “I hardly ever sleep now, and the reason I cannot sleep is that I have a sin on me.”

“A sin?” said Clotilde. “But surely not!”

“A sin,” said Sister Maria. “One who acquiesces in a wickedness is likewise wicked. And I have acquiesced.”

Then she told Clotilde that she had been with the Queen during her accouchement, and that the Queen was sane.

Clotilde followed the earlier example of the palace chaplain and spent the rest of that night face down on the cold floor of the chapel before the altar. When she arose in the morning her last battle was fought. Not that she said this.

“I prayed for help and guidance,” was what she said. “And I received it.”

She left the convent soon after, drew her small patrimony from the bank, wrote to Rudi and then betook herself to Italy, where she rented a little house not so far from the Queen’s villa and settled herself to her vigil.

It lasted exactly three years.

VII

The Queen was just past eighteen when they sent her to that dreary villa in Italy, a damp cold place, with its tattered gold and rose papers fairly hanging from the walls, and its sparse furnishing and stone floors.

So far as any one could tell, life was over for her. She was surrounded by obsequious jailers who never let her pass the high wall of the garden, and although she wrote letters, none were ever sent out.

One day she found the little wooden box which now lies on her bedside table, and it became her treasure-house.

“She cut out and kept every scrap she could find in the newspapers about her baby,” said Clotilde. “They are there now, in that box. Some of them are quite worn with much handling.”

She never found any mention of Rudi.

After a time, to save herself from madness, she began to keep a journal, and it was found and published anonymously later by the Countess of B——, who had been in attendance on her. In one place she says:

“What must really matter is to remember rather than to be remembered; to love rather than to be loved. Anything else is selfish. As for the loneliness, are we not always alone? That seems to be the great struggle each human heart makes, to bridge to another heart, no matter how close, the unbridgeable gulf that lies between them.”

And she was nineteen!

But again the journal is more intimate.

“Orange trees and climbing jessamine, and the garden flooded with sunlight to-day. Even I, who am dead, feel the life that is around me outside these walls.”

“I do not weep any more. I must not send waves of wretchedness out into the world, lest they somehow touch and depress them. Another press cutting this morning, which has cheered the day.”

And then an unintelligible line or two, to the uninitiated: “She would make him happy, because she loves him. I think I knew that before she did. But have I courage enough to bear it?”

Clotilde has never mentioned that journal.

So one can see them all at that time; the old Archduke sitting alone in his dingy library, fingering his beard and staring at the picture of his dead wife on the wall, faithful to her now that it was too late; the King, fighting revolution and pinning his faith on an heir who daily signalled to him his own infamy; Rudi in a sun-baked African garrison, fighting like a devil when there was fighting on, and drinking himself into forgetfulness in the intervals; Clotilde trying to hold to that peace of God she had found, throwing useless little notes cut into apples over the villa wall; and the Queen searching the papers and journals for some news of her lover and her child, and when she found them hoarding them in the little wooden box.

There is a very definite picture of the Queen at that time. Cut off from the world, she had assumed the attitude and more or less the habit of a nun.

“She wore always the same thing, a trailing habit of soft white wool, high in the neck and with long loose sleeves. And over her hair—you know how lovely it is—she often wore a long white veil, peasant fashion. She seemed to think she ought to hide it. I don’t know why.”

Sometime during her imprisonment came the word that the little Crown Prince was dying. She got that too out of the newspapers, for it is to be remembered always that the King still preserved, possibly even to himself, that fiction of her insanity. Probably she was more nearly insane during that illness of her baby’s than ever before or since.

There is just one entry in her journal in the month that covered it, and it is dateless.

“If he dies, I shall kill myself.”

But sometime during that month occurred that strange incident of which the journal makes no record.

She ran away and went to the capital.

Vigilance had relaxed at the villa, and somehow at night she got out. She took a train at the station, a veiled and slender figure, and was on her way before the alarm was raised.

“She had to pass my house to do it,” Clotilde said. “So many things happen like that in life. Friends are close at hand, and we keep looking past them and far away.”

Once at the capital she drove to the palace. Not to the main entrance, but to that small private one which the King used for his own purposes.

“The sentry was very much frightened when she raised her veil,” Clotilde explained. “But after all she was the Queen. He let her in, crossing himself because the peasants are afraid of the insane, and she went directly up the stairs.”

It was early. Save for a few servants who gathered into whispering groups, nobody saw her, and she went unmolested to the Crown Prince’s suite. Outside the anteroom were doctors and nurses, the cardinal and the Prime Minister. She never looked at them, but passed straight through, and a sort of stricken silence followed her.

The King, you see, was in the anteroom alone. He had been with the child all night, not so much watching a little life ebb away as his own power, his very throne.

He would not let her pass. She prayed and wept, for she was frantic, but he listened unmoved, and as soon as he could get help he had her taken away. The newspapers never printed that story, and the sole result was a redoubled watch on her at the villa after that.

It was on the very day that the Crown Prince was pronounced out of danger that Rudi appeared again.

It was a warm night, and Clotilde had thrown a lace shawl about her and gone into the garden. The air was heavy with magnolia, and—

“I had just been thinking about him, my dear. It was so long since I had heard”—when she saw a man in the roadway, staring up at the Queen’s villa. He was perfectly motionless when she first saw him, but then he made some sort of vague despairing gesture and there was something familiar about it.

“Rudi!” she said, and had to steady herself by the magnolia tree. He came closer and recognised her.

She must have been a lovely young thing that night in her garden, with the lace scarf over her head and the magnolia lighted like stars above her. And Rudi came closer and said in an incredulous voice:

“Clotilde! But surely—”

“It is Clotilde,” she said in a shaken voice.

He took both her hands.

“It seems to me I’ve been looking all over the world for you,” he said.

She must have thrilled to that for a moment, must have had an instant of hope. But it was gone the next second, for he said:

“I might have known you would never desert her.”

But—mark this—he did not know the Queen was sane. Nor that the little Prince was his own child, and Clotilde did not tell him either until the next morning.

“He was so haggard,” is what she said. “He went back to the inn in the village after a time, and I had to think of how to break the news to him.”

It was much more than that, poor Clotilde. Just by keeping silent what might not have happened? Soft Italian skies and early spring gardens, and Rudi lonely and desperate, reaching out to any friendly hand.

“I did not go to bed at all,” was all she said.

By dawn she must have decided, for very early she sent him a note and they had breakfast together. That little touch of intimate life must have pretty well broken down her resolve. One can figure her giving him his morning coffee, and maybe just managing to touch his fingers as she did so, and Rudi perhaps saying:

“Quite like husband and wife, eh what?” or his equivalent of it.

But mostly Rudi staring at the villa above with a hurt and puzzled look.

Later on she told him the young Queen was sane, and a prisoner. He was the old fighting Rudi then, as mad as the man who had staged that mock wedding in the desert town. He knocked over a chair and was for killing the King outright. She could not get in a word.

“But I’ll take his throne away first,” he roared. “I’ll put him in the mud and trample on him. I’ll—”

“I wonder if you will,” she said quietly. Her tone made him turn and look at her.

“Why not?” he said, more quietly.

“Why do you think he has put her away?”

“He never had any right to her. She was my wife.”

“Rudi,” she said, leaning forward, “why has the little Crown Prince the mark of the Archduke’s fingers on his wrist?”

Then he knew.

VIII

The knowledge of his fatherhood did to Rudi what motherhood had done to the Queen. It matured and sobered him.

“He came a boy and went away a man,” Clotilde put it. “You see, he was trapped like the rest of us. There was of course no hope of ever getting the boy, and to try to overthrow the King was only to risk the child’s life.”

But he began almost fiercely to plot the Queen’s release.

He was no fool, was Rudi. He could stand—and did—at Clotilde’s window for hours, staring at the villa and yearning passionately for the girl imprisoned there. But another part of his brain was acutely active and he began to pin his faith on the Archduke.

“After all, he was her father,” Clotilde explained. “And he had been a violent man, but not so bitter as her mother.”