[PREFACE]
[TRANSLATOR'S NOTE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]

MAJESTY

A NOVEL

BY

LOUIS COUPERUS

NEWLY TRANSLATED BY

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

WITH A PREFACE BY

STEPHEN McKENNA

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1921

PREFACE

The betting-book in one of London's oldest and most famous clubs contains a wager, with odds laid at one hundred sovereigns to ten, that "within five years there will not remain two crowned heads in Europe." The condition—"in the event of war between Great Britain and Germany"—was imposed by the date of the wager, for one member was venturing his hundred to ten at a moment when another was dining with him to kill time before the British prime minister's ultimatum took effect: the imperial German government had to deliver its reply before midnight, by Greenwich time, or eleven o'clock, by Central European reckoning.

Since the fourth of August, 1914, the King of the Hellenes, the Czar of Bulgaria, the Emperor-King of Austria-Hungary, the German Kaiser and a host of smaller princes have abdicated and sought asylum in countries left neutral by the war; the Czar of All the Russias also abdicated, but was executed without an opportunity of escape. Thus, though republican and royalist may protest that the wager was too sanguine or too pessimistic, the challenger must have taken credit for his prescience, as three of the great powers and two of the lesser converted, one after another, their half-divine sovereign into their wholly material scapegoat; by no great special pleading he might claim that the bet was won in spirit if not in fact when the morning of Armistice Day shewed monarchy surviving only in Spain, Italy, Roumania and Greece, in the small liberal kingdoms of Scandinavia and the Netherlands, in the minute principality of Monaco, in the crowned republic of Great Britain and Ireland and in the eternal anachronism of the Ottoman Empire. And the time-limit of five years had been exceeded by only three months.

In the peaceful period, four times longer, between the publication of Majesty in 1894 and the outbreak of the Great War, historians were kept hardly less busy with their record of fallen monarchs and extinguished dynasties: King Humbert of Italy was assassinated in 1900; King Alexander of Servia, with his queen, in 1903; King Carlos of Portugal, with the heir-apparent, in 1908; and the Sultan Abdul Hamid was deposed and imprisoned in 1909. Before the year 1894 no ruler of note had removed himself or been removed since the assassination of the Czar Alexander II in 1881; this study of "majesty" in its strength and, still more, in its weakness was published at a time when even the autocrat was more secure on his throne than at any period since "the year of revolution," 1848.

If Majesty is to be regarded as a roman à clef, there is a temptation, after six and twenty years, to call Couperus 'prophetic:' to call him that and nothing else is to turn blind eyes to the intuitive understanding which is more precious than divination, to ignore, in one book, the insight which illumines all and to overlook the quality which, among all the chronicles of kings, penetrates beyond romance and makes of Majesty an essay in human psychology. So long as the fairy-tales of childhood are woven about handsome princes and the fair-haired daughters of kings, there is no danger that the setting of royalty will ever lose its glamour; so long as "romantic" means primarily that which is "strange," the writer of romance may bind his spell on all to whom kings' houses and queens' gardens are an unfamiliar world; so long as the picturesque and traditional hold sway, the sanction and titles of kingship, the dignities and the procedure, the inhibitions and aloofness of royalty will fascinate, whether they like it or not, all those in whose veins there is no "golden drop" of blood royal. A romance of kingship, alike in the hands of dramatist, melodramatist and sycophant, is certain of commercial success.

The strength of this temptation is to be measured by the number of novels written round the triumphs and intrigues of kings, their amours and tragedies, their conflicts and disasters: King Cophetua and "King Sun," Prince Hal and Richard the Second, Louis the Eleventh and Charles the First, a king in hiding, a king in exile, a king in disguise; so long as he is a king, he is a safe investment for the romantic writer. But the weakness of those who succumb to this temptation is to be measured by their failure to make kings live in literature. Those few who survive beyond the brief term of ephemeral popularity survive more by reason of their office than of themselves and Jan de Witt makes little show beside Louis the Sixteenth; their robes are of so much greater account than their persons that the feeblest German prince cuts a more imposing figure than the strongest president of the Swiss Confederation.

Those who stand out in despite of their romantic setting, the human, perplexed Hamlets and vacillating, remorseful Richards, are inevitably few; and few they are likely to remain so long as the frame outshines the picture and the prince is labelled and left a celestial being apart, or labelled and dragged into passing sentimental contrast with men less exalted; it would seem that to regard a king first as a man and afterwards as an hereditary office-holder was to waste his romantic possibilities. This, nevertheless, is what Couperus has set himself to do in Majesty; he presents his family of kings as a branch of the human family; their dignity ceases to be stupefying when all are equally high-born; they wear their uniforms and robes as other men wear the conventional clothes of their trade; and, stripping them of their titles and decorations, he paints his group of men and women who have been born to rule, as others are born to till the soil; to marry for love or reasons of state, as others marry for love or reasons of convenience; to experience such emotions as are common to all men and to face the special duties and dangers apportioned to their caste by the organization of society:

"... The Gothlandic family," says Couperus, "... lived [at Altseeborgen] for four months, without palace-etiquette, in the greatest simplicity. They formed a numerous family and there were always many visitors. The king attended to state affairs in homely fashion at the castle. His grandchildren would run into his room while he was discussing important business with the prime minister.... He just patted their flaxen curls and sent them away to play, with a caress.... From all the courts of Europe, which were as one great family, different members came from time to time to stay, bringing with them the irrespective nuances of different nationality, something exotic in accent and moral ideas, so far as this was not merged in their cosmopolitanism."

To this "one great family" the organization of society apportioned with one hand special privileges and exemptions, with the other special hardships and dangers. Revolution, to these professional rulers, was what successful trade rivalry is to a store-keeper; assassination was a daily risk to which store-keepers are commonly not exposed:

"... Such is the life of rulers: the emperor lay dead, killed by a simple pistol-shot; and the court chamberlain was very busy, the masters of ceremonies unable to agree; the pomp of an imperial funeral was prepared in all its intricacy; through all Europe sped the after-shudder of fright; every newspaper was filled with telegrams and long articles....

"All this was because of one shot from a fanatic, a martyr for the people's rights.

"The Empress Elizabeth stared with wide-open eyes at the fate that had overtaken her. Not thus had she ever pictured to herself that it would come, thus, so rudely, in the midst of that festivity and in the presence of their royal guest...."

It is to be understood, none the less, that she had always expected it to come: assassination is one of the special risks attaching to majesty at all times when one form of kingship or the whole institution of kings is debated and criticized. "When the intellectual developments or culture of a race," wrote Heine, in The Citizen Kingdom in 1832, "cease to accord with its old established institutions, the necessary result is a combat in which the latter are overthrown. This is called a revolution. Until this revolution is complete, so long as the reform of these institutions does not agree at all points with the intellectual development, the habits and the wants of the people, during this period the national malady is not wholly cured and the ailing and agitated people will often relapse into the weakness of exhaustion and at times be subject to fits of burning fever. When this fever is upon them, they tear the lightest bandages and the most healing lint from their old wounds, throw the most benevolent and noble-hearted nurses out of window and themselves roll about in agony, until at length they find themselves in circumstances or adapt themselves to institutions that suit them better."

So much for the race, in the gripe of growing-pains; but what of the nurses? How little benevolent or noble-hearted soever they be, nurses are bound by the honour of their profession and by personal pride not to forsake their patients. In one passage of Majesty the crown-prince is shaken by fundamental doubts of his own inherited right to rule; he questions and analyses until he is brought to heel by his imperial father who remembers that an excess of "victorious analysis" rotted the intellectual foundations of the old order and prepared the way for the logical French revolution. In another passage the boy realizes without any qualification that he at least is unfitted for the burthen of empire and that it is better to abdicate in favour of his brother or to commit suicide than to play Atlas with a world that he cannot sustain; once more, his imperial father silences any admission that his own flesh and blood can be too degenerate for the task of majesty. And so, at the moral sword-point, this hereditary nurse is held to the duty and privilege of standing by an hereditary patient whom he cannot relieve with "the most healing lint" and who may at any moment throw him out of window.

Not even in thought may majesty abdicate: a prince inherits his philosophy as he inherits his title.

"Life is so simple," proclaims the collectivist Zanti.

"'As you picture it, but not in reality,' objected Herman.

"Zanti looked at him angrily, stopped still, to be able to talk with greater ease, and, passionately, violently, exclaimed:

"'And do you in reality find it better than I picture it? I do not, sir, and I hope to turn my picture into reality. You and yours once, ages ago, made your picture reality; now it is the turn of us others: your reality has lasted long enough....'

"Othomar, haughtily, tried to say something in contradiction; the old man, however, suddenly turned to him and, gently though roughly, with his penetrating, fanatical voice which made Othomar shudder:

"'For you, sir, I feel pity!... Do you know why? Because the time will come!... The hour will come. Perhaps it is very near. If it does not come in your father's reign, it will come in your reign or your son's. But come it will! And therefore I feel pity for you. For you will not have enough love for your people. Not enough love to say to them, "I am as all of you and nothing more. I will possess no more than any of you, for I do not want abundance while you suffer need. I will not rule over you, for I am only a human being like yourselves and no more human than you." Are you more human? If you were more, then you would be entitled to rule, yes, then, then.... See here, young man, you will never have so much love for your people as to do all this, oh, and more still and more! You will govern and possess abundance and wage war. But the time will come! Therefore I have pity for you ... although I oughtn't to!'"

The dead weight of inheritance, always a psychological fascination for Couperus, becomes doubly fascinating when one generation after another inherits an undwindling legacy of divine, ironic whim. As, in The Books of the Small Souls and in Old People and the Things that Pass, the children and grandchildren are born with minds tainted by prenatal memories, so, in Majesty, a prenatal influence has ordered the life and determined the fate of an infant who first draws breath as Count of Lycilia, eldest son of the Duke of Xara, himself crown-prince and eldest son of the Emperor of Liparia. There is no escape, no lack of heirs to the ironic inheritance: "'If it's a son,'" says the empress mother, on the morrow of her husband's assassination, "'it will be a Duke of Xara....'

"And then the Emperor of Liparia ... lost his self-restraint. In one lightning-flash, one zig-zag of terror, he saw again his life as crown-prince, he thought of his unborn son. What would become of this child of fate? Would it be a repetition of himself, of his hesitation, his melancholy and his despair?..."

If Majesty be a roman à clef, "this child of fate," with his father and mother and sisters, had his short spell of hesitation, melancholy and despair ended in 1918 by the revolver-shots of his gaolers. If Othomar be not a portrait of the Czar Nicolas II., it is hard to believe that the character was not suggested by him; though the Czar Alexander III. died a natural death, he would seem to have supplied a parallel for the Emperor Oscar, as Alexander II. supplied one for the liberal emperor, Othomar XI. The fanatical Zanti has his model in Count Tolstoi; and even the tragic romance of Prince von Lohe-Obkowitz has its historical counterpart.

But the interest and value of the book do not lie in any fancied resemblance, among the characters, to living or dead kings; the study of Prince Othomar does not depend on any likeness to the Czar Nicolas II.; Couperus succeeds or fails not as a court painter, but as a great sympathetic and imaginative artist who does or does not create, in the unfamiliar atmosphere of a court, first the collective life and spirit of a caste long trained to formalize its life and suppress its emotions, then a group of human characters who stand out compelling and vital against the posturing, shadowy kings and queens of romance.

To the composition of Majesty go the understanding and the historic sense, the irony and tenderness that enable Couperus in later books to draw with unfaltering touch his exquisite portraits of old age and youth, of men and women, in their moments of solitude and in their reactions upon one another. Few men have stepped so lightly and surely across the confines of the centuries and the continents; his intuition makes him equally at home in Alexandria and the Hague, with women and men, in the second century and in the twentieth; and it is not benumbed by the surface inhumanity of a court. When the Archduchess Valérie had lost her lover, the crown-prince could not understand her being able to talk as usual at dinner.

"It irritated him, his want of penetration of the human heart: how could he develop it? A future ruler ought to be able to see things at a single glance.... And suddenly, perhaps merely because of his desire for human knowledge, the thought arose within him that she was concealing her emotions, that perhaps she was still suffering intensely, but that she was pretending and bearing up: was she not a princess of the blood? They all learnt that, they of the blood, to pretend, to bear up! It was bred in their bones."

Perhaps it was bred in his bones, perhaps it was his mere desire for human knowledge that gave Couperus his penetration into the emotions which they of the blood were taught to conceal. In none of his books has he lavished more sympathy than in his painting of Prince Othomar's vacillation and passionate good-will, his timidity and desperate courage; nowhere has he used greater tenderness than in his sketch of the chivalry and gratitude which did duty for love in the passionless union of Valérie and the crown-prince.

STEPHEN MCKENNA.

LINCOLN'S INN, LONDON, 7 October, 1920.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

My first translation of Majesty was written in collaboration with my dear friend Ernest Dowson and published in the year 1895. A small edition was sold by the London publisher to Messrs. D. Appleton & Company and has long been out of print. Messrs. Appleton, with characteristic generosity, have relinquished to the present publishers any copyright which they had established in the book and have thus enabled me to produce this new version. For even a translator's style undergoes notable modifications in a quarter of a century; and I should not have been satisfied to see this novel reissued in its earlier English form. The story should not therefore be regarded as a mere reprint.

Incidentally, when collating the old Teixeira-Dowson version with the original, I was struck with the chaste and discreet appearance of the Dutch as compared with the English edition, soiled as the latter was on every page with a splash of capital letters. Is it some innate snobbery or merely lack of intelligence or thought that induces English writers—and for long myself among them—to dab a capital at the head of such nouns as the "emperor," the "crown-prince," the "duke," the "chancellor," "empire" and "state," nay, even the "major," the "professor," the "doctor," or of such adjectives as "royal" and "imperial"? If we are to write of the "Major" and the "Professor," why not be still more lavish with our capitals and write of the "Midshipman," the "Postmistress" and the "Postman"? Anyhow, I felt that a suitable time had come to experiment with an innovation and I decided to reduce my capital letters to a minimum and to affix them to titles only when these were followed by the name. Even the Germans do not distinguish their titles with capitals; they have the more logical habit of beginning every substantive with a capital; and, in their murky language, this habit has one advantage, that it assists the reader to hunt the elusive verbs to their lair. The English have not this reason nor this excuse.

My thanks are due not only to Messrs. Appleton but also to Mr. Stephen McKenna, the most acceptable of our younger novelists, who in his admiration for the elder craftsman, has volunteered to write a preface to Louis Couperus' present masterpiece.

ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS.

VENTNOR, I.W., 1 November, 1920.

MAJESTY

CHAPTER I

1

Lipara, usually a city white as marble: long, white rows of villas on a southern blue sea; endless, elegant esplanades on the front, with palms whose green lacquer shimmered against an atmosphere of vivid blue ether. But to-day there drifted above it, heavily, a sombre, grey sky, fraught with storm and tragedy, like a leviathan in the firmament. And this grey sky was full of mystery, full of destiny, of strange destiny: it precipitated no thunder, but remained hanging over the city, merely casting faint shadows over the brightness of its palaces, over the width of its squares and streets, over the blue of its sea, its harbour, where the ships, upright, still, anxious, raised their tall masts on high.

White, square, massive, amid the verdure of the Elizabeth Parks, in the more intimate mystery of its own great plane-trees—the celebrated plane-trees of Lipara, world-famed trees—stood the Imperial, the emperor's palace, quasi-Moorish, with white, pointed arcades: it stood as the civic crown of the capital, one great architectural jewel, separated from the city, though standing in its very midst, by all that park-like verdure.

The empress, Elizabeth of Liparia, sat in the private drawing-room of her apartments in the right wing; she sat with a lady-in-waiting, the Countess Hélène of Thesbia. The windows were open; they opened on the park; the famous plane-trees rose there, knotty with age, wide-spreading, anxious, motionless with their trimmed leaves, between which a dull-green twilight shimmered upon the lawns which ran into the distance, rolling softly and smoothly, like tight-stretched velvet, into an endless violet vista, with just here or there the one strident white patch of a statue.

A great silence buzzed its strange sound of stillness indoors from the park; it buzzed around the empress. She sat smiling; she listened to Hélène reading aloud; she tried to listen, she did not always understand. A nervous dread haunted her, surrounded her, as with an invisible net of meshes, unbreakable. This dread was for her husband, her children, her elder son, her daughters, her younger boy. This dread crept along the carpet beneath her feet; it hung from the ceiling above her head, stole round about her through the whole room. This dread was in the park: it came from afar, from the violet vistas; it swept over the lawns and climbed in through the open windows; it fell from the trees, it fell from the sky, the grey, thunder-laden sky. This dread trembled through Liparia, through the whole of Liparia, through the whole empire; it trembled in, in to the empress, enveloping her whole being....

Then Elizabeth drew a deep breath and smiled. Hélène had looked up to her at a certain sentence with a light stress of voice and eyes, pointing the dialogue of the novel; this made the empress smile and she listened afresh. The anxiety smouldered in her, but she extinguished it with abounding acquiescence, acquiescence in what was to happen, in what must happen.

The novel which Hélène was reading was Daniële Cortis, a work that was in vogue at court because the Princess Thera had liked it. The countess read carefully and with great expression; the rhythm of the Italian came from her lips with the elegance of very pointed Venetian glass, flowery and transparent. And the empress wondered that Hélène could read so beautifully and that she did not seem to feel the anxiety which nevertheless stole about everywhere, like a spectre.

There was a knock at the door leading from the anteroom; a flunkey opened the door; a lady-in-waiting appeared between the hangings and curtseyed:

"His highness Prince Herman," she announced in a voice that hesitated a little, as though she knew that this hour of the afternoon was almost sacred to the empress.

"Ask the prince to come in," replied the empress: her voice, with all its haughtiness, sounded kind and attractive and sympathetic. "We have been expecting the prince so long...."

The door remained open, the lady-in-waiting disappeared, the flunkey waited at the hangings, motionless, for the prince to come. His firm tread sounded, approaching quickly, through the anteroom; and he made a pleasant entrance, with friendliness in his healthy, red face and the joy of meeting in his large grey eyes, with their gleaming black pupils. The flunkey closed the door behind him.

"Aunt!"

The prince stepped towards the empress with both hands outstretched. She had risen, as had Hélène, and she moved a step towards him; she took his two hands and allowed him to kiss her heartily on both cheeks.

Hélène curtseyed.

"Countess of Thesbia," said the prince, bowing.

"So you have come at last!" said the empress, with jesting discontent. She shook her head, but could not but look kindly at his pleasant, handsome, healthy face. "Why did you not telegraph for certain when you were coming? Then Othomar would have gone to the station, but now...."

She shrugged her shoulders with a smile of regret, as much as to say that now it could not be helped that his reception had only been tel quel....

"But, aunt," said Herman—the tone of his voice implied that he would never have demanded this of Othomar—"I have been excellently received: General Ducardi, Leoni, Fasti, our worthy minister and Siridsen...."

"Othomar will be sorry all the same," said the empress. "He is out driving now with Thera. Thera is driving her new bays. I can't understand why they went; it is sure to rain!"

The empress resumed her seat, with an anxious look at the weather outside; the prince and Hélène likewise sat down. A cross-fire of enquiries after the two families was kindled between the empress and her nephew; they had not seen each other for months. There was much to be discussed; the times were full of disaster; and the empress showed a long telegram which the emperor had sent from Altara about the inundations. Her fingers shook as they held the message.

She was still a woman of remarkable beauty, in spite of her grown-up children. But the charm of her beauty was apparent to very few. In public that beauty acquired a hardness as of a cameo: fine, clear-cut lines; great, cold, brown eyes, without expression; a cold, closed mouth; before people her slender figure assumed something stiff and automatic; she even showed herself thus before the more intimate circles of the court. But when she was seen, as now, in the seclusion of her own drawing-room, with no one except her nephew, whom she loved almost as much as her own children, and one little lady-in-waiting whom she spoilt, then, in spite of the dread which she repressed deep down in her heart, she became another woman. In her simple grey silk—she was in slight mourning for a relation—what was stiff and automatic in her figure changed into a gracious suppleness of carriage and movement, as spontaneous as the other was studied; the cameo of her face became animated; a look almost of melancholy came into her eyes; and, above all, a laugh about that cold, hard mouth was as a gleam of sympathy that rendered her unrecognizable to one who had seen her for the first time cold, stiff and austere.

Prince Herman of Gothland was the second son of her sister, the Queen of Gothland. A tall, sturdy lad in his undress uniform as a naval lieutenant, with the healthy, Teutonic fairness of the house of Gothland: a firm neck, broad shoulders, the swelling chest of an athlete, the determined quickness of movement of a lively nature, more than sufficient intelligence in his large grey eyes with the black pupils and with now and then a single pleasant, soft note in his baritone voice, a note that caused a momentary slight surprise and rendered him attractive when it sounded gently in the midst of his virility. And now that he sat there, easily, simply, pleasantly and yet with a certain dignity that did not permit him an absolute excess of joviality; now that he spoke, with his sweet voice, of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters and asked after his uncle, the Emperor Oscar of Liparia, asked after Othomar, Thera: now, yes, now he aroused in the empress a delicate feeling of family affection, something of a secret bond of blood, a very solid support of relationship amid the isolation of their respective grandeurs, the grandeurs of Liparia and Gothland. Yonder, at the other side of Europe, far, far away from her and yet so near through the magnetism of this delicate feeling, she felt Gothland lying as one vast plain of love, whither she could allow her thoughts to wander. She was no longer giddy with melancholy and dread in that she was so high together with those whom she loved, her husband and her children, for she was not high alone: in her highness she leant against another highness, Liparia against Gothland, Gothland against Liparia. It brought moist tears to her eyes, it brought a melancholy that was like happiness clinging to her breath. The spectre of dread had disappeared. She could have embraced her nephew; she would have liked to tell him all this: his mere presence gave her this feeling, a feeling of comfort and of strength; she had not known it for months.

2

The door was opened; the flunkey stood stiff and upright, with a fixed look that stared straight before him, in the shadow of the hangings. Princess Thera and Othomar entered. The princess went up gaily and kindly to her cousin, they kissed; Othomar also embraced Herman, with a single word. But, in comparison with the natural utterances of the empress and of Thera, this single word of the Duke of Xara sounded studied and smilingly cold, not intimate, and carried a needless air of etiquette. It failed to conceal a translucent insincerity, a transparent show that made no effort to simulate affection, but seemed quite simply what at this moment it could not but seem, a greeting of feigned kindness between two cousins of the same age. Prince Herman was accustomed to this: there was no intimacy between him and Othomar; and this was the more striking when they saw each other for the first time after several months; it affected the empress keenly, disagreeably.

The conversation again turned upon the inundations in the north. The empress showed her children the latest telegram, the same that she had shown to Herman; it mentioned fresh disasters: still more villages swept away, towns harassed by the swollen and overflowing rivers, after a month of rain that had resembled the Flood. It had caused the emperor to proceed three days ago to the northern provinces; but they at court were now every moment expecting his orders that the crown-prince should replace him there, as he himself was returning to Lipara because of the cabinet crisis.

The crown-prince discussed all this a little coldly and formally. He was a young man of twenty-one, slender and of short stature, very slightly built, with delicate, melancholy features and dull, black eyes, that generally stared straight before him; a young moustache tinted his upper lip as with a stripe of Indian ink. He had a way of drooping his head a little on his chest and then looking up from under his eyelids; he generally sat very quiet; his hands, which were small and broad but delicate, rested evenly upon his knees; and he had a trick of carrying his left hand to his eyes and then—he was a little short-sighted—just peering at his ring. He was tightly girt in the blue-and-white uniform of a captain in the lancers, the uniform which he generally wore in public: its silver frogs lent a certain breadth to his slenderness; on his right wrist he wore a narrow, dull-gold bracelet.

"This is the first letter," said the empress. "Read it out, Thera...."

The princess took the letter. The emperor wrote:

"It is heartrending to see all this and to be able to do so little. The whole district south of the Zanthos, from Altara to Lycilia, is one expanse of water; where villages stood there now float the remains of bridges and houses, trees, accumulations of roofs, dead cattle, carts and household furniture and, as we were going along the Therezia Dyke, which—God be praised!—still stands firm at Altara, a cluster of corpses was slowly washed straight before our feet in one gigantic embrace of death...."

The crown-prince had suddenly turned pale; he remained sitting in his usual attitude, peering at his ring, with the trick that was his habit. Thera read on. When the crown-prince looked up he met his mother's eyes. She nodded to him with her eyelids, unseen by the others, who were listening to the letter; he smiled—a smile full of heartbreaking melancholy—and answered her with the same invisible quiver of the eyelids; it was as though he understood that gentle greeting and drew a scrap of comfort from it for a mysterious, silent sorrow that depressed him within himself, that lay on his breast like an oppression of the breath, like a nightmare in his waking life.

But Prince Herman was already talking about the ministerial crisis: it was momentarily expected that the authoritative government, rendered powerless, since the new elections, in the house of deputies with its majority of constitutionals, would proffer its resignation to the emperor. The question, as always, was that of a revision of the constitution, which the constitutionals desired and the authoritatives—taking the side of the emperor—opposed. The Empress Elizabeth heaved a sigh of fatigue: how often had not this question of a revision of the constitution, which in Liparia always meant an extension of the constitution and a restriction of the imperial authority, come looming up during their twenty years' reign as a personal attack upon her husband! Resembling his long line of Liparian ancestors, hereditarily autocratic, Oscar could never forgive his father, Othomar XI., for allowing a constitution to be passed in his more liberal reign. And now, at this crisis, it was no small thing that they were asking, the constitutionals. The house of peers, hereditary and authoritative, the emperor's own body, which cancelled every proposal of a too constitutional character sent up from the house of deputies, was no longer to stand above them, hereditary and therefore, because of its hereditary nature, invariably authoritative: they wanted to make it elective! Even Othomar XI., with his modern ideas in favour of a constitution, would never have suffered this attack upon one of the most ancient institutions of the empire, an attack which would shake Liparia to its foundations....

While Herman was debating this, casually, his words lightly touching this all-important question, it seemed to Othomar as though he were turning giddy. A world passed through his head, rushing with rapid clouds through his imagination; and out of these clouds visions loomed up before him, pale-red, quick as lightning, terrible as a kind of apocalypse, the universe ending in a dynamite explosion. Out of these clouds there flashed up for an instant a scene, a recollection of the history of his imperial inheritance: an emperor of Liparia murdered centuries ago by one of his favourites at a court festival. Revolutions in other countries of Europe, the French revolution, flickered up with a blood-red reflection; the strikes in the quick-silver mines of the eastern provinces grinned at him out of them, out of the clouds, the world of clouds storming through his thoughts.... And so many more, so many more, all so rapid, with the rapidity of their lightning-flashes; he could not grasp them, the ruddy lightning-flashes; it all just flickered through him and then away: it flickered away, far away!... And it seemed strange to him that he was sitting there, in his mother's drawing-room, with the stately park swarming behind the plate-glass windows, with tints of old, medieval gold-leather, now, in the lowered gleam of the sun-rays; with his mother opposite him, so sweet, so daintily gentle in the intimacy of this short, uninterrupted meeting: his cousin talking and his sister replying and the little lady-in-waiting listening with a smile.... How strange to sit like this, so easily, so peacefully, so serenely, in the seclusion of their palace, as though Liparia were not shaking like an old, crazy tower!... Yes, they were talking about the crisis, Herman and Thera, but what did talking amount to? Words, nothing but words! Why this endless stringing together of words, beautiful, empty words, which a sovereign is obliged to string together and then utter to his subjects, now on this occasion, now on that? No, no, they were not in his province, speeches! For what, after all, were they supposed to express, this or that? What was right, what was just, what was right and just for their empire, this or that? How could one know, how could one be certain, how could one avoid hesitating, seeking, groping, blind-folded? Even if he had a thousand eyes all over the empire, would he be able to see everything that might happen? And, if he were omniscient, would he always be able to know what would be right? The constitution: was it good for a country to have a constitution or not? In Russia: was it good in Russia? A republic: would a republic be better? And who was right? Was his father right in wanting to reign as an absolute monarch, with his hereditary house of peers, in which he, Othomar, now recalled his admission, as Duke of Xara, at his eighteenth year, with the ducal crown and the robes and chain of the order of the Imperial Orb? Or was the house of deputies right? Would it be a good thing to place a restriction upon absolute sovereignty? It was difficult to decide.... The inundations: "It is heartrending to see all this and to be able to do so little.... An expanse of water all the way to Lycilia, a cluster of corpses in the embrace of death...."

It lightened.

Dull, heavy rumblings rolled through the sky; thick drops fell hard as liquid hail upon the leaves of the plane-trees; the whole park seemed to shiver, dreading the threatening cloud-burst. Hélène rose and closed the open window.

Then Othomar heard a strange sound: Syria.... Had they ceased talking of the house of peers? Syria, Syria....

"The king and queen were to have come next week, but they have now postponed their visit," said the empress.

"Because of the inundations," added Thera. "They are going to Constantinople first. I only wish they would remain with the sultan...."

"This visit seems to me at least to be something of an infliction," said Herman, laughing. "And how long do they stay, aunt?"

The empress raised her shoulders to say that she did not know: the approaching visit of the King and Queen of Syria pleased neither her nor the emperor, but it was not to be avoided.... However, not wishing to say much on this subject before Hélène, she replied:

"All the court festivities are now postponed, as you know, Herman, because of these terrible disasters. You will have a quiet time, my boy. You had better go with Othomar to Count Myxila's this evening...."

Count Myxila, the imperial chancellor, was that day keeping his sixtieth birthday. He was the emperor's principal favourite. That morning he had been to the empress to receive her congratulations. The crown-prince was, by the emperor's desire, to appear for a moment at the reception in the chancellor's palace.

Prince Herman glanced at Othomar enquiringly, as though expecting a word from him too.

"Of course," the Duke of Zara hastened to say. "Myxila will reckon on seeing Herman...."

3

When, at half-past ten in the evening, Othomar and Herman returned from the chancellor's palace in a downpour of rain, it was known among the empress' entourage also that the government had resigned; the princes had met the ministers at Count Myxila's; the crisis had thrilled through the outward ceremonial of the reception like a threatening shudder of fever. Also there was a telegram from the emperor for the Duke of Xara:

"I wish your imperial highness to proceed to Altara to-morrow.

"OSCAR."

The telegram did not come as a surprise, but was the natural consequence of the resignation of the government and of the emperor's return, for the emperor did not wish to leave the scene of the disasters without the consolation that the heir-apparent was about to replace him.

After a moment spent with the empress, Othomar withdrew to his own apartments. He sent for his equerry, Prince Dutri, and consulted with him shortly and in a few words, after which the equerry hurried away with much ado. In his dressing-room Othomar found his valet, Andro, who had been warned by one of the chamberlains and was already busily packing up.

"Don't pack too much," he said, as the valet rose respectfully from the trunk before which he was kneeling. "It would only be in the way...."

So soon as he had said this, he failed to see the reason. Nor did the valet seem to take any notice of it: kneeling down again before the trunk, he continued to pack what he thought fit. It would be quite right as Andro was doing it, thought Othomar.

And he flung himself into a chair in his study. One of the windows was open; a single standard lamp in a corner gave a dim light. The furious downpour raged outside; a humid whiff of wet leaves drifted indoors.

The prince was tired, too tired to summon Andro to pull off his tight patent-leather boots. He was wearing the white-and-gold uniform of a colonel of the throne-guards, the imperial body-guard; the chain of the order of the Imperial Orb hung round his neck; other decorations studded his breast. The reception at the imperial chancellor's still whirled before his eyes; in his brain buzzed, mingling with the rain, the inevitable conversations about the crisis, the government, the house of peers. He saw himself the crown-prince, always the crown-prince, always too condescending, too affable, not sufficiently natural, not simple, not easy like Herman; and he saw Herman moving easily through the rooms of the chancellor's palace, asking quite simply to be introduced to the ladies, now by Count Myxila and again by an equerry. And he envied his cousin, who was a second son. Herman did not cause the atmosphere around him to freeze at once, as did he, with the cold imperial look of his crown-princedom.

He saw the ministers, the ministers who were about to retire, each with his own interests at heart instead of those of Liparia. He suspected this from their humble attitudes before him, the crown-prince, when he had spoken to all of them.... He felt that they were only playing a part, that there was much in them that they did not allow to transpire; and he suddenly asked himself why, why this should all be so, why so much show, nothing but show.... And he was suffering now, deep in his breast; the tightness of his uniform, loaded with decorations, oppressed him....

He saw old Countess Myxila and some other ladies, whom he had seen curtseying amid the crackling of their trains and the sudden downward glitter of their diamonds, whom he had seen flushing with pleasure because the Duke of Xara had taken notice of them. And the wife also of the court-marshal, the Duchess of Yemena, who had so long been absent from court in voluntary exile at her estate in Vaza: he saw her approaching on Prince Dutri's arm. For he did not know her: years ago, when she was at court, he was a boy of fifteen, undergoing a strict military education, seldom with the empress and never at the court festivals; he had never seen the duchess at that time.

Now, in the twilight of that one lamp, with the weather raging outside, he saw her once more and she became as it were transparent in the lines of the rain; she looked strange, seen through the rain, as through a curtain of wet muslin. A tall woman, voluptuously formed, half-naked under the white radiance of her diamond necklace, that was how she approached him: her hair blue-black with a gleam in it, her face a little pale under a thin bloom of rose powder; she came nearer, slowly, hesitating, in her yellow-gold figured satin, edged with heavy sable; she bowed before him, with a deep, reverential curtsey before the imperial presence: her head sank upon her breast, the tiara in her black hair shot forth rays, her whole stature curved down as with one serpentine line of grace in the material of gleaming gold that shone about her bosom and seemed to break over the thick folds of her train with a filagree of light. He had spoken to her. She rose from the billows of her reverential grace; she replied, he forgot what; her eyes sparkled upon his like black stars. She had made an impression upon him. He thought it was because he had heard her much spoken of as a woman with a life full of passion, a thing that was a riddle to him. His education had been military and strictly chaste, his youth had remained uncorrupted by the easy morals of the court, perhaps because his parents, after a long and secret separation, known to none but themselves, had come together again from a need of family-life and mutual support; the Empress Elizabeth had forgiven the Emperor Oscar and submitted to his infidelities as inevitable. Round about him Othomar had never had occasion to observe the life of the senses. At the university of Altara, where he had studied, he had never taken part, except officially, in the diversions of the students; he had always remained the crown-prince, not from haughtiness, but because he was unable to do otherwise, from lack of ease and tact.

And something in the duchess had made an impression on him, as of a thing unknown. He felt in this woman, who curtseyed so deeply before him with her sphinx-like smile, a world of emotion and knowledge which he did not possess; he had felt poor in comparison with her, small and insignificant. What was it that she possessed and he not? Was it a riddle of the soul? Were there such things, soul-enigmas, and was it worth while to try to fathom them? Such a woman as she, was she not quite different from his mother and sisters? Or did his equerries, among themselves, speak of his sisters too as they spoke of the duchess? And this life of passion, this life of love for so many, was that then the truth? Did they not slander her, the equerries, or at least did they not make truth seem different from what it was, as they always did in everything, as if the truth must always be made to seem other to a prince than to a subject?

He felt tired. And he sat on, striving in vain to drive from him the whirl of the strange figures of that reception seen through a transparency of rain. Before him, as though in his room, they all walked through one another: the ministers, the equerries, Count Myxila and the duchess....

A knock, a chamberlain:

"Prince Herman is asking whether he may intrude on your highness for a minute."

He nodded yes. After a moment Prince Herman entered.

"You are always welcome, Herman," said Othomar; and his voice sounded cold in spite of himself.

"I have come to ask you something," said Herman of Gothland. "I should much like to go with you to Altara to-morrow; but I want to be certain that you don't mind. I would not have asked it of my own accord, if my aunt hadn't spoken of it. What do you think?"

Othomar looked at Herman; Othomar did not like his cool voice:

"If you do so out of sympathy, because you happen to be at Lipara, by all means," he began....

"Let me tell you once more: I am doing this chiefly because of ... your mother."

His voice sounded very emphatic.

"Do it for her then," replied Othomar, gently. "It will give me great pleasure if you go with me for my mother's sake."

Herman realized that he had been unnecessarily cool and emphatic. He was sorry. The empress had asked him to accompany Othomar. He had hesitated at first, knowing that there was a lack of sympathy between Othomar and him. Then he had yielded, but had not known how to ask Othomar. His usual ease of manner had forsaken him, as it always did in Othomar's presence.

"Very well, then," Herman stammered, awkwardly.

Othomar put out his hand:

"I understand your intention perfectly. Mamma would like you to go too, because she will then be sure that there is some one with me whom I can trust in everything. Isn't that it?"

Herman pressed his hand:

"Yes," he said, pleased, contented, feeling no annoyance that Othomar had had the best of the conversation, delighted that his cousin took it like this. "Yes, just so; that's how it is. Don't let me detain you now: it's late. Good-night...."

"Good-night...."

Herman went. It was still pouring with rain. Othomar sat down again; the chill of the rainy night pressed coldly into the room and fell upon his shoulders. But he remained staring motionlessly at the tips of his boots.

Andro entered softly:

"Does your highness wish me to...."

Othomar nodded. The valet first closed the window and drew the blind and then knelt before the prince, who, with a gesture of fatigue, put out his foot to him and rested the heel of his boot on the man's knee.

4

The downpour ceased during the night; but it was raining again in the morning. It was seven o'clock; a sultry moisture covered the colossal glass roof of the station, as though it had been breathed upon from end to end. The special train stood waiting; the engine gave short, powerful snorts, like a discontented, tired beast. A great multitude, a buzzing accumulation of vague people filled the glass hall; a detachment of infantry—two files, to right and left; the uniforms, dark-red and pale-grey; above, a faint glitter of bayonets—drew two long stripes of colour diagonally through the sombre station, cut the crowd into two and kept a broad space clear in front of the imperial waiting-room.

Dissatisfaction hovered over the crowd; angry glances flashed; rough words crackled sharply through the air, mingled with curses; a contemptuous laugh sounded in a corner.

There was a long wait; then a cheer was heard outside: the prince had arrived in front of the station. The waiting-room became filled with uniforms, glistening faintly in the morning light; brief sentences were exchanged in a low voice.

Othomar entered with Herman and the Marquis of Dazzara, the governor of the capital, the highest military authority, whose rich uniform stood out against the simpler ones of the others, even against those of the princes; they were followed by adjutants, Liparian and Gothland equerries, aides-de-camp. The mayor of the town and the managing director of the railway stepped towards Othomar and saluted him; the mayor stumbled through long phrases before the two princes.

"Why wasn't the approach to the platform closed to the public?" asked General Ducardi of the director, after the adjutant-general had glanced at the platform through the lace curtains, curious about the humming outside.

The director shrugged his shoulders:

"That was our first intention; it was done in that way when the emperor left," he replied. "But a special message was received from the Imperial, urgently requesting us not to shut off the platform; it was the Duke of Xara's wish."

"And how about all those soldiers?"

"By command of the governor of the capital. An aide-de-camp came and told us that a detachment of infantry was coming as a guard-of-honour."

"Was that aide-de-camp also from the Imperial?"

"No, from the governor's palace...."

Ducardi shrugged his shoulders; an angry growl fluttered his great, grey moustache. He walked straight up to the crown-prince:

"Is your highness aware that there is a detachment of infantry outside?" he said, interrupting the mayor's long sentences.

The governor heard him and drew nearer.

"A detachment?... No," said Othomar, in astonishment.

"Did your highness not command it, then?" Ducardi continued.

"I? No," Othomar repeated.

The governor bowed low; the general's loud, gruff voice unnerved him.

"I thought," said the governor, urbanely, but mumbling, stammering—and he tried to be at once humble before the prince and haughty towards the general—"I thought it would be well to safeguard your highness against possible ... possible unpleasantness, especially as your highness desired ... desired that the platform should remain open to the public...."

Othomar looked out as Ducardi had done; he saw the infantry drawn up and the crowd behind; angry, murmuring, drab, threatening:

"But, excellency," he said, aloud, to the governor, "in that case it would have been better to shut off the platform entirely. This is quite wrong. The police would have been sufficient to prevent any crowding."

"I was afraid of ... of unpleasantness, highness. Troubled times, the people so discontented," he whispered, fearing to be overheard by the equerries.

"Quite wrong," repeated Othomar, angrily, nervously excited. "Let the infantry march off."

"That's out of the question now," Ducardi hastened to say, with an unhappy smile. "You understand that that can't be done."

The conversation had been carried on aside, in a half-whispering tone; yet everybody seemed to listen. All eyes were gazing on the group surrounding the princes; the others were silent.

"Then let us prolong this regrettable situation as little as possible; we may as well go," said Othomar; and his voice quivered high, young and nervous in his clear throat.

The doors were opened; Othomar, in his hurry, stepped out first; the equerries and aides-de-camp did not follow him at once, as they had to make way for Prince Herman, who happened to be a little behind. Herman hurried up to Othomar; the others followed.

The princes made a movement of the head to left and right as though to bow; but their eyes met the fixed, round eyes of the soldiers, who had presented arms with a flash; they saluted and walked on to their compartment a little quickly, with an unpleasant feeling in their backs.

Under the colossal glass roof of the station, behind the files of soldiers, the crowd stood as still as death, for the humming had almost ceased; there was no curse nor scornful word heard, but also no cheer, no loud, loyal hurrah sweet to the ears of princes.

And the faces of those vague people, separated by uniforms and bayonets from their future ruler, remained gazing fixedly with dull, hostile eyes, with firmly-closed lips, full of forced restraint, as though to stare him out of existence in the imperial compartment.

The princes waved their hands from the windows to the dignitaries, who stood on the platform bowing, saluting. The engine whistled, shrieked, tore the close atmosphere of humidity under the dome; the train left the station, drove into the early morning, which was lighter outside the glass roof, glided as it were over the rainy town upon viaducts, with canals, streets, squares beneath it; farther on, the pinnacles and spires of the palaces and churches; the two marble towers of the cathedral, with the doves nestling in the renascence tracery of the lace-work of its steeples, standing out pale-white against the sky, which was now turning blue; then, in the centre of the town—green and wide, one oasis—the Elizabeth Parks, the white mass of the Imperial and, behind that, the gigantic bend of the quays, the harbour with its forest of masts, the oval curve of the horizon of the sea, all wet, glittering, raining in the distance.

Othomar looked sombrely before him. Herman smiled to him:

"Come, don't think about it any more," he advised him, adding with a laugh, "Our poor governor has had his appetite spoilt for to-day."

General Ducardi muttered an inward curse:

"Monstrously stupid," Herman heard him mumbling.

"I wanted to show them," said Othomar, suddenly.... He had intended to say, "that I am not afraid of them." He threw a glance around him, saw the eyes of Prince Dutri, his equerry, fixed upon him like a basilisk's and let his voice change from proud to faint-hearted; sadly he concluded, "that I love them and trust them so completely. Why need it have happened like this?..."

His voice had sounded faint, to please Prince Dutri; but it displeased the general. He first glanced aside at his crown-prince and then at the Prince of Gothland; he drew a comparison; his eye continued to rest appreciatively, in soldierly approval, on the smart naval lieutenant, broad and strong, sitting with his hands on his thighs, bending forward a little, looking back at the white capital as it receded before his eyes through the slanting rainbeams....

After four hours' travelling, Novi, in the province of Xara. The train stops; the princes and their suite alight, consult clocks, watches. They express surprise, they walk up and down the platform for half an hour, for an hour. Prince Herman engages in a busy conversation with the station-master. It is still raining.

At last the special from Altara is signalled. The train glides in and stops; the Emperor Oscar alights from the imperial compartment. He is followed by generals and aides-de-camp: their uniforms, the emperor's included, have lost something of their smartness and hang in tired creases from their shoulders, like clothes worn a long time. The emperor, still young, broad and sturdy and only just turning grey, walks with a firm step; he embraces his son, his nephew, brusquely, hastily. The imperial party disappear into the waiting-room; Ducardi and one of the Gothlandic officers follow them. The interview, however, is a short one: in ten minutes they reappear on the platform; brief words and handshakes are exchanged; the emperor steps back into his compartment, the crown-prince into his. The prince's train waits until his father's passes it—a last wave of the hand—then it too steams away....

Care lies like a cloud upon Othomar's forehead. He remembers his father's words: in a desperate condition, our fine old city. The Therezia Dyke may be giving way; so little energy in the municipal council; thousands of people without a roof to cover them, fleeing, spending the night in churches, in public buildings. And his last word:

"Send some of them to St. Ladislas...."

Othomar reflects; all are silent about him, depressed by the after-sound of the emperor's words, which have painted the disaster anew, brought it afresh before their eyes: the eyes of Ducardi, who knows himself to be more ready with sword in war than with sympathy in cases of inundation; the eyes of Dutri, still filled with the mundane glamour of the incomparable capital. Some part of their self-concentration falls silent; a thought of what they are about to see crosses their minds.

And Othomar reflects. What shall he do, what can he do? Is it not too much that is asked of him? Can he, can he combat the stress of the waters?

"Oh, this rain, this rain!" he mutters, secretly clenching his fist.

Five hours' more travelling. The towers of the city, the crenulated outline and Titanic plateaus of St. Ladislas, with its bastions, shoot up on the horizon, shift to one side when approached. The train stops, in the open country, at a little halting-place; the princes know that the Central Station is flooded; the whole railway-management has been transferred to this halt. And suddenly they stand in the presence of the smooth, green, watery expanse of the Zanthos, which has spread itself into one sea of water, broad and even, hardly rippled, like a wrath appeased. A punt is waiting and carries them through ruins of houses, through floating household goods. A dead horse catches on to the punt; a musty odour of damp decay hovers about. At an over-turned house, men in a punt are busied fishing up a corpse; it hangs on their boat-hooks with slack arms and long, wet hair, the pallid, dead head drooping backwards; it is a woman. Herman sees Othomar's lips quiver.

Now they float through a street of tall, deserted houses in a poor suburb. This part has been flooded for days. They alight in a square; the people are there; they cheer. Louder and louder they cheer, moved by the sight of their prince, who has come across the water to save them. A group of students shout, call out his name and cheer and wave their coloured caps.

Othomar shakes hands with the mayor, the minister for waterways, the governor of Altara and other dignitaries. His heart is full; he feels a sob welling up from his breast.

From among the group of students one steps forward, a big, tall lad:

"Highness!" he cries. "May we be your guard-of-honour?"

Etiquette hardly exists here, though the dignitaries look angry. Othomar, remembering his own student days, not yet so long ago, presses the student's hand; Prince Herman does the same; and the students grow excited and once more shout and clamour:

"Hurrah! Hurrah! Othomar for ever! Gothland for ever!"

Behind this square the city is perceived to be in distress, a silent distress from yet greater danger threatening: the old coronation-city, the city of learning and tradition, the sombre monument of the middle ages; she looks grey compared with white Lipara, which lies laughing yonder and is beautiful with new marble on her blue sea, but which does not love her sovereigns so well as she does, the dethroned capital, with her gigantic Romanesque cathedral, where the sacred imperial crown with the cross of St. Ladislas is pressed on the temples of every emperor of Liparia. Though her masters are faithless to her and have for centuries lived in their white Imperial over yonder and no longer in the old castellated fortress of the country's patron saint, she, the old city, the mother of the country, remains faithful to them with her maternal love and not because of her oath, but because of her blood, of her heart, of all her life, which is her old tradition....

But, like his father, Othomar was not this time to go to the Castle of St. Ladislas: the fortress lay too high and too far from the town, too far from the scene of disasters. Open carriages stood in waiting; they stepped in, the students flung themselves on horseback; the princes were to take up their residence in the palace of the cardinal-archbishop, the primate of Liparia, in the Episcopal, which, together with the cathedral and the Old Palace, formed one colossal, ancient, grey mass, a town in itself, the very heart of the city.

They rode quickly on. The people cheered; they look upon them as a train of deliverers who, they thought, would at last bring them safety. Between the departure of the emperor and the arrival of the prince a depression had reigned which, at the sight of Othomar, changed into morbid enthusiasm.

It became suddenly dark, but not through the sun's setting—it was only five o'clock in the month of March in the south—it became dark because of the clouds, the ships in the sky carrying in their tense, bowl-shaped, giant sails water which already was beginning to trickle down again in drops. Under that grey sky the cheering of the people rose in a minor key, when suddenly, as though the swollen clouds were bursting open with one rent, a flood dashed down in a solitary, perpendicular sheet of water.

Othomar was sitting with Herman and Ducardi in the first carriage.

"Would not your highness prefer to have the carriage closed?" asked the old general, helping the prince on with his cape.

Othomar hesitated; he had no time to answer the general; the crowd increased, became thicker, cheered; and he bowed in acknowledgement, saluted, nodded. The heavy rain clattered straight down. The hard rainbeams ran down the princes' and the general's necks, down their backs, soaked their knees. The crowd stood sheltered under an irregular roof of umbrellas, as though grouped under wet, black stars, filled the narrow streets of the old city, pressed in between the outriders and the carriage: the coachman had to drive more slowly.

"Won't you have the carriage shut?" Herman repeated after Ducardi.

Othomar still hesitated. Then—and he himself thought his words a little theatrical and did not know how they would sound—he answered aloud:

"No, do not let us be afraid of the water; they have all suffered from the water here."

But Ducardi looked at him; he felt something quiver inside him for his prince....

The carriage remained open. In one of the landaus following, Prince Dutri looked round furiously to see how much longer the Duke of Xara meant to let himself be saturated with rain and his suite with him. In the narrow, high streets near the cathedral they had to drive almost at a walking-pace, right through the cheering of the crowding populace. Soaked to the skin, the Crown-prince of Liparia with his following arrived at the cardinal-archbishop's; they left a trail of water behind them on the staircases and in the corridors of the Episcopal.

5

In changed uniforms, a short dinner with the high prelate; a few canons and minor ecclesiastics sit down with them. The room is large and sombre, barely lighted with a feeble glimmer of candles; the silver gleams dully on the dressers of old black oak; the frescoes on the walls—sacred subjects—are barely distinguishable. A silent haste quickens the jaws; the conversation is conducted in an undertone; the servants, in their dark livery, move as though on tiptoe. The cardinal, on either side of whom the princes are seated, is tall and thin, with a refined, ascetic face and the steel-blue eyes of an enthusiast; his voice issues from low down in his throat, like that of an oracle; he says something of the Lord's will and makes a submissive gesture with both hands, the fingers lightly outspread, as Jesus does in the old pictures. One of the priests, the cardinal's private secretary, a young man with a round, pink face and soft, white hands, laughs rather loudly at a joke of Prince Dutri, who, sitting next to him, tells a story about a countess in Lipara whom they both know. The cardinal casts a stern glance at the frivolous secretary.

After the hurried dinner, the princes and their suite ride into the town on horseback, cheered wherever they go. The water already mounts close to the cathedral and the Archiepiscopal Palace. Groups of men, women and children, sobbing, flow towards the prince, as he rides across the dark squares; they carry torches about him, as the gas is not everywhere lighted; the ruddy flares look strange, romantic, over the ancient dark mass of the walls and are reflected with long streaks of blood in the water lying in the narrow alleys. A large house of many storeys and rows of little windows appears to have suddenly gone under: a sudden mysterious pressure of water, filtering from the foundations through the masonry of the cellars, making its treacherous way through the least crack or crevice. The inhabitants save themselves in skiffs, which pass with little red lights through the black, watery town; a child cries at the top of its voice. They are poor people there in hundreds, living, packed as in boxes. The princes alight and step into a boat and are rowed to the spot; it becomes known who they are; they themselves help an old woman with three children, all wet to the waist, to climb on to a raft; they themselves give them money, shout instructions to them. And they point to the old fortress of St. Ladislas as a refuge....

But a cry arises, farther on, a cry at first not clearly perceived in the darkness of the evening, then at last distinctly audible:

"The Therezia Dyke! The Therezia Dyke!..."

The princes want to go there; it is not possible on horseback; the only way is in boats. Prince Herman himself grasps the sculls; in the next boat Dutri declares to Von Fest, one of the Gothlandic equerries, that, taken all round, he thinks Venice more comfortable....

"The Therezia Dyke! The Therezia Dyke!..."

The dyke lies like the black back of a great, long beast just outside the town, on the left bank of the Zanthos, and protects the whole St. Therezia district, the eastern portion of the city, which stands tolerably high, from the river, which generally overflows in springtime. The boats glide over the water-streets; a landing is possible in the Therezia Square; lanterns are burning; torches flare, ruddy scintillations dart over the water. The square is large and wide; the houses stand black round about it and surround it in the night with their irregular lines of gables and chimneys, with the massive pile of the church of St. Therezia, whose steeples are lost in the dark sky; in the centre of the square rises a great equestrian statue of a Liparian emperor, gigantic in motionless bronze, stretching one arm, sword in hand, over the petty swarming of the crowd.

Othomar and Herman have sent their three equerries, Dutri, Leoni and Von Fest, for whom horses have been found and saddled, to the dyke, which protects a whole suburb of villas, factories and the St. Therezia railway-station against the waters of the Zanthos, which has already poured its right bank over the country and is drowning it. The princes stand in the middle of the square on the steps of the pedestal of the statue; they would have liked to go on farther, but the mayor himself has begged them to stay where they are: farther on mortal danger threatens at every moment.... All that could be done has been done; there is nothing more to do but wait.

Quarters of an hour, half-hours, pass. This waiting for terrible news calms them; they hope afresh. The officers ride to and fro; the villas and factories yonder are deserted: a whole town lies empty, forsaken. Prince Dutri, turning his horse, which he has ridden out of breath, assures them that the embankment will hold firm; after he has spoken with the princes, he is surrounded: it is the occupiers of the villas, the manufacturers, who overwhelm him with questions, fortified by the self-assurance of the imperial equerry. Dutri gallops off once more.

Now the doors of the church are opened wide, quite wide; at the end of the vista, between the pillars, the tiny lights glitter on the altar; a procession files out slowly: a mitred bishop, priests, acolytes, singing and carrying banners and swinging clouds of smoke from their censers; behind the upraised crucifix, the relics of St. Therezia, in their antique shrine of medieval gold and crystal and precious stones, round or roughly cut; it is borne under a canopy and in the shimmering gleam of candles it glitters and sparkles like a sacred jewel, like a constellation, across that sombre square, through that black night of disaster; flicker the giant emeralds, glitters the precious chased gold and before the Most Holy the crowded populace draws back on either side and falls upon its knees. This is the fifth time to-day that the procession goes its round, that the reliquary is borne on high, to exorcize the calamity. It passes the statue, the princes kneel down; the Latin of the chant, the gleam of the relics in their shrine, the cloud of the incense pass over them with the blessing of the bishop....

The procession has brought stillness to the square, but a murmur now approaches as from afar.... The crowd seems to surge as though in one wave, nobody is now kneeling; the very procession is broken up and confused. Through the throng rushes the report: the dyke has given way!...

They do not yet believe it; but suddenly from above the fort of St. Ladislas, which spreads its ramparts about the castle, a shot thunders out and vibrates over the black city and shakes through the black sky as though its rebound were breaking against the lowering clouds. A second shot thunders after it, as with giant cymbals of catastrophe, a third ... the whole town knows that the Zanthos has broken the dyke.

The whole square is in confused motion, like a swarm of ants; troops of tardy fugitives still come thronging in, poor ones now and indigent, who had not been able to fly earlier, who had been still hoping; through the crush Prince Dutri, panting, cursing, on horseback, terror in his eyes, strives to reach the statue; the distant murmur as of a sea comes nearer and nearer. Men scatter along the streets, on foot or in boats; the disordered procession, with the glitter of its reliquary, seeming to reel on the billows of a human sea, scatters towards the church.

"Is not even the square safe?" asks Othomar.

He can hardly speak, his chest seems cramped as it were with iron, his eyes fill with tears, an immense despair of impotence and pity suffuses his soul.

The mayor shakes his head:

"The square lies lower than the suburbs, highness; you cannot remain here. For God's sake go back to the Episcopal in a boat!..."

But the princes insist on remaining, though the murmur grows louder and louder.

"Go into the church in that case, highnesses: that is the only safe place left," the mayor beseeches. "I beg you, for God's sake!"

The square is already swept clean, the torch-bearers lead the princes to the steps of the church; the Zanthos comes billowing on, like a soft thunder skimming the ground.

Inside the church the organ sounds; they sing, they pray all through the night. And the whole night long everything outside remains chaotically black, gently murmuring....

When the first dawn pales over the sky, which begins in the distance to assume tints of rose and grey, faint opal and mother-of-pearl, Othomar and Herman and the equerries emerge on the steps of the church.

The square stands under water; the houses rise out of the water; the statue of Othomar III. waves its bronze arm and sword over a lake that ripples in the morning breeze.

From the Therezia Square to the Cathedral Square everything lies under water.

6

"TO HER IMPERIAL MAJESTY THE EMPRESS OF LIPARIA

"THE EPISCOPAL,
"ALTARA,
"—March, 18—.

"MY ADORED MOTHER,

"Your letter reproaches me with not writing to you two days ago, without delay; forgive me, for my thoughts have so constantly been full of you. But I felt so tired yesterday, after a busy day, and I lacked the strength to write to you in the evening. Let me tell you now of my experiences.

"You describe to me the terrible impression produced at Lipara by the telegram from here about the breach in the Therezia Dyke and how none slept at the Imperial. We too were up all night, in St. Therezia's Church. No such fearful inundation has been remembered for fifty years; at the time of that which my father remembers in his childhood, the Therezia Square was not flooded and the water only came as far, they say, as the great iron-factory.

"How can I describe to you what I felt that night, while we were hoping and waiting, hoping in turn that God and His Holy Mother would ward off this disaster from us and waiting for the catastrophe to burst forth! We stood on the pedestal of the equestrian statue, unable to do anything more. Oh, that impotence about me, that impotence within me! I kept on asking myself what I was there for, if I could do nothing to help my people. Never before, dearest Mother, have I felt this feeling of impotence, of inability to counteract the inevitable, so possess my soul, until it was wholly filled with despair; but neither have I ever so thoroughly realized that everything in life has its two sides, that the greatest disaster has not only its black shadow but also its bright side, for never, never have I felt so strongly and utterly, through my despair, the love for our people, a thing that I did not yet know could exist in our hearts as a truth, as I then felt it quivering all through me; and this love gave me an immense melancholy at the thought that all of them, the millions of souls of our empire, will never know, or, if they did know, believe that I loved them so, loved them as though my own blood ran in their veins. Nor do I wish to deceive myself and I well know that I should never have this feeling at Lipara, but I have it here, in our ancient city, which gives us all her sympathy. I feel here that I myself am more of a Slav, like our Altarians, than a Latin, like our southerners in Lipara and Thracyna; I feel here that I am of their blood, a thing that I do not feel yonder.

"No doubt much has been said and written in the papers about the want of tact of the Marquis of Dazzara, with his foolish guard-of-honour at the station at our departure; be that as it may, I felt great sadness in the train to think that, in spite of their having come to see me leave, they did not seem to love me. I know you will again disapprove of this as false sensitiveness on my part, but I cannot help it, my dear Mother: I am like that, I am hypersensitive to sympathy in general and to the utterances of our people in particular. And for that reason too I love the people here, very simply and childishly perhaps, because they show that they love me: enthusiasm everywhere, genuine, unaffected enthusiasm wherever we go; and yet what are we able to do for them, except give them money! I find this sympathy among the lowest: workmen and labourers whom I had never seen before to my knowledge and to whom I could only speak three or four words of comfort—and I can never find much else to say, it is always the same—and among the soldiers, although they must feel instinctively, in spite of never seeing me except in uniform, that I am no soldier at heart; and also among the students, the priests, the civic authorities and the higher functionaries. Yesterday we went round everywhere, to all the places appointed as refuges: not only the barracks and shops and factories, but even some of the rooms at the law-courts, two of the theatres and the prison, poor souls! And also St. Ladislas. From the Round Tower we had a view of the surrounding country: towards the east there was nothing but water and water, like a sea. My heart felt as though screwed tight into my breast.

"We went to the university also. I remembered most of the professors from two years ago, when I was here as an undergraduate.

"It was a terrible scene outside the town. Oh, Mamma, there were hundreds, there were thousands of corpses, laid out side by side on a meadow, as in a mortuary, before the burial, for identification! I saw harrowing scenes, my heart was torn asunder: troops of relations who sought or who, sobbing, had found. A terrible air of woe filled the whole atmosphere. I felt sick and turned quite pale, it required all my energy to prevent myself from fainting, but Herman put his arm through mine and supported me as well as he was able without ostentation, while a couple of doctors from among the group of physicians to whom I was speaking gave me something to smell. Oh, Mamma, it was a terrible spectacle, all those pallid, shapeless, swollen corpses, on the green grass, and, above, the sky, which had become deep blue again!

"I have informed the municipal council, in accordance with your wish and my father's, that you are each of you presenting a personal donation of a million florins and I presented my own at the same time. The whole world seems in sympathy with us; money is flowing in from every side, but the damage is like a pit that cannot be filled up. As you say, the donation of our Syrian friends is truly princely and oriental.

"What more have I to tell you? I really do not know; my brain is confused with a nightmare of ghastly visions and I have difficulty in thinking logically. But I promise you, my dear Mother, to do what I can and to do it with all my might; and all I ask is that you will send me a single word to tell me that you are not too dissatisfied with your boy.

"As my father desires, I will stay here another week; it seems to do the people good to see us, they love us so. They were enraptured when it was announced that after my departure you and Thera were coming to Altara. You with your soft hand will be able to do so much that we have omitted. How they do love us here! And why are we not always at St. Ladislas? Though the fortress is sombre, it is bright with their sympathy.

"But do not let me write to you so poetically in these distressful days, in which we should be practical. Herman's society does me a deal of good and I can do more when he is by my side. General Ducardi is a fine, indefatigable fellow, as always. The others have all been very willing and practical; and, if I may be allowed respectfully to differ from my Father, I am inclined to think that the municipal council does what it can. It is true, an English engineer told me that with better precautions and a more thorough supervision the Therezia Dyke would perhaps have held out; however, I don't know.

"Herman will accompany me on my journey through the provinces. We shall go to Lycilia and Vaza and so far as possible to the lowlands. These are of course in the worst case.

"I have just received the telegrams: the Marquis of Dazzara dismissed and the Duke of Mena-Doni—I don't like that man—governor of the capital! Lipara under martial law! And will my father succeed in preserving our house of peers by this dissolution of the house of deputies?

"Dearest Mother, his eminence has just sent to ask me to receive him. I do not want to keep him waiting and therefore close my letter hurriedly; with a fond embrace, I am, with fondest and most respectful love,

"your own boy,
"OTHOMAR."

CHAPTER II

1

The Province of Vaza also, lying to the north of the Altara Highlands, the Alpine range of the Gigants, was harassed in parts by the Zanthos. The capital, Vaza, was flooded. In the neighbourhood of the mountain-slopes the province had been spared. There vast terraces of vineyards lay, alternating with forests of chestnut-trees and walnut-trees and olives. The glittering white snow-line of the mountain-tops surged up against a dazzling blue sky, piercing it with its crests and biting long pieces out of the deep azure in ragged lines; it seemed to whet ice-teeth, gleaming white fangs, against the metal of the firmament, which was like burnished steel. There, enthroned on its rocks, twelve miles from the town, stood old Castel Vaza, the castle of the dukes of Yemena and counts of Vaza, surrounded by parks and woods, half castle, half citadel, strong, simple, medieval, rough in outline, with its four towers and its square patches of battlements, rounding off the horizon about it on every side and keeping it aloof. Near at hand, a swarm of little villages; in the distance, the towers and steeples, the huddled roofs of Vaza; still farther, in the circle of panorama that broadly girt the towers, the wide Zanthos, winding down to hurl itself into the sea, and Lycilia, white in the sun with its little squares of houses, set brilliantly on the blue of the water; then a second sea: the mountain-tops, surging away in snowy vistas and distant mists. And, also glittering in the sun, those strange lakes on the Zanthos: the water which the full river had vomited, the inundations....

The square castle, enclosing a courtyard in its four wings, has two more wings added at the back, in a newer style of more elegant renascence, and looking on the park, in which lie the ornamental basins, like oval dishes of liquid silver, set in emerald lawns. The fallow deer graze there, dreaming, as it were, and graceful, roaming slowly on slim legs: sometimes, suddenly, extending themselves, their heads thrown back, their eyes wild, they run some distance, a number of them, fleeing before an unseen terror; others, calmer, graze on, laconically, philosophically.

The dukes of Yemena and counts of Vaza are one of the oldest families of the empire; and their ancestral tree is rooted ages back, before the time of the first emperor of Liparia. The present duke, court-marshal and Constable of Liparia, has three children of his first marriage: the heir to his title, the young Marquis of Xardi, aide-de-camp to the emperor, and two daughters, younger, girls still, at a convent.

The duchess is alone at the castle. She is sitting in a large boudoir, built out with a triangular loggia, and looking over the park, the basins, the deer. A breeze is blowing outside; and the rapid clouds, which, like flaky spectres, like rags hidden beneath diaphanous veils, chase one another through the clear blue sky, trail their shadows, like quick eclipses, across the park, just tinting it with passing darkness, which darkens the deer in their turn and then makes them gleam brown again in the sun. It is silent outside; it is silent in the castle. The castle stands secluded; within, the servants move softly through the reception-rooms and corridors, speaking in whispers, in expectation of the august visitors.

Lunch is over. The duchess lies half-out-stretched on a couch and gazes at the deer. She is not yet dressed and wears a tea-gown, loose, with many folds: vieux rose broché, salmon-coloured plush and old lace. When she is alone, she likes plenty of light, from a healthy need of space and air; the curtains are drawn aside from the tall bow-windows and the shrillness of the spring sky comes streaming in. But the light does not suit her beauty; for, though her hair is still raven black, her complexion has the dullness of faded white roses; her eyes, which can be beautiful, large, liquid and dark, look full of lassitude, encircled with pale-yellow shadows; and very clearly visible are the little wrinkles at the side, the little grooves etched around the delicate nose, the lines that have lengthened the mouth and draw it down.

The duchess rises slowly; she passes through a door that leads to her bedroom and dressing-room and stays away for a few moments. Then she returns; in both hands, pressing it to her, with difficulty, she carries an obviously heavy casket and sets it on the table in front of the couch. The casket is of old wrought silver enriched with gilt chasing and great blue turquoises, of that costly renascence work which is not made nowadays. She selects a little straight, gold key from her bracelet and unlocks the casket. The jewels glisten—pearls, brilliants, sapphires, emeralds—and catch in their facets all the spring light of the sky, blue, white and yellow. But the duchess presses a spring unclosing a secret drawer, from which she takes two packets of letters and some photographs.

The photographs all show the face of a man no longer young, a strange face, half-dreamy, half-sensual, filled with great mystery and great charm. The photographs show him in the elaborate uniform of an officer of the throne-guards, in fancy-dress as a medieval knight, in flannels and in ordinary mufti. The duchess' eyes pass slowly from one to the other; she compares the likenesses, a sad smile about her mouth and melancholy in her eyes. Then she unties the ribbons of the letters, takes them out of the carefully preserved envelopes, unfolds them and reads here and there and reads again and refolds them....

She knows by heart the phrases that still tell her of a strange passion, the most fervent, the truest, the simplest and perhaps for that reason the strangest that she has ever felt, that has surrounded her with fairy meshes of fire. Though her eyes look out again at the deer—the sunshine streams like fluid gold over the park—between her and the peaceful landscape there rise up, transparent, in tenderly gleaming phantasmagorias, remembrances of the past, the pictures of that love, and it seems to her as though sparks are dancing before her eyes, as though brilliant curves and scintillations of light are swarming on every hand. She lives through past events in a few moments; then she closes her eyes, draws her hand over her forehead and thinks how sad it is that the past is nothing more than a little memory, which flies like dust and ashes through our souls which we sometimes endeavour, in vain, to collect in a costly urn. How sad it is that one cannot go on mourning, though one wish to, because life does not permit it! Nothing but that dust and ashes in her soul ... and those letters, those photographs....

She locks them away again and now gazes at the jewels. And she looks well into her own heart, sees herself exactly as she is, for she knows that she has been loyal, always, loyal to him and to herself: loyal when their love broke like a glittering rainbow of sparkling colours on a wide firmament and she became unwilling to see or to exist and withdrew from the court into this castle and let it be rumoured that a lingering illness was causing her to pine away. And she mourned and mourned, first sobbing and wringing her hands, then calmer in despair, then ... The deer had gone on grazing there, as though they always remained unchanged. But she....

She had been loyal, always: in her despair and also in what followed, in the abatement of that despair. Then she was saddest of all, because despair was able to abate. Then sad, because she still lived and felt vitality within her. Then ... because she began to grow bored. Because of all this a great despair had filled her strange soul, luxuriantly, as with the morbid blossoms of strange orchids. She hated, despised, cursed herself. But nothing changed in her. She was bored.

She led a solitary life at the castle. Her husband and her stepson were at Lipara; her stepdaughters, to whom she was much attached, were finishing their education at a convent, of which an imperial princess, a sister of the emperor, was abbess.

She was alone, she never saw anybody. And she was bored. Life awoke in her anew, for it had only slumbered, she had deemed it dead, had wished to bury it in a sepulchre around which her memories should stand as statues. Within herself, she felt herself to be what she had always been, in spite of all her love: a woman of the world, hankering after the glamour of imperial surroundings, that court splendour which fatally reattracts and is indispensable to those who have inhaled it from their birth as their vital air. And, at moments when she was not thinking of her despair, she thought of the Imperial, saw herself there, brilliant in her ripe beauty, made much of and adored as she had always been.

Then she caused her stepson, the Marquis of Xardi, to spread the rumour that she was convalescent. A month later, in the middle of the winter season, after a great court festival but before one of the intimate assemblies in the empress' own apartments, she requested an audience of Elizabeth.

Thus she beheld herself in true, clear truth and was deeply mournful in her poor soul filled with desire of love and desire of the world and humanity, because life insisted on continuing so cruelly, as in a mad triumphal progress, crushing her memories under its chariot-wheels, clattering through her melancholy with its trumpet-blasts, making her see the paltriness of mankind, the pettiness of its feeling, the littleness of its soul, which is nevertheless the only thing it has....

The duchess locks the twice-precious casket away again. She forgets what is going on about her, what is awaiting her; she gazes, dreams and lives again in the past, with the enjoyment which a woman finds in the past when she loses her youth.

There is a knock at the door, a footman appears and bows:

"Excellency, the cook begs urgently to be allowed to speak to you in person...."

"The cook?..."

She raises her beautiful face, dreaming, half-laughing, with its profile like Cleopatra's, so Egyptian in its delicacy and symmetry, settles herself a little higher on the couch and leans on her hand:

"Let him come in...."

Everything returns to her, reality, the actual day; and she smiles because of it and shrugs her shoulders: such is life.

The footman goes out; the cook enters in his white apron and white cap: he is nervous and, now that his mistress is already frowning her eyebrows because of his disrespectful costume, he begins to stammer:

"Forgive me, excellency...."

And he points with an unhappy face to his apron, his white sleeves....

And he complains that the head gamekeeper has not provided sufficient ortolans. He cannot make his pasty; he dares not take it upon himself, excellency.

She looks at him with her sphinx-like eyes; she has a great inclination to burst out laughing at his comical face, his despairing gestures, his outstretched arms, to laugh and also to cry wildly and loudly.

"What are we to do, excellency, what are we to do?"

The town is too far away; there is no time to send there before dinner and, for the matter of that, they never have anything in the town. Besides, it is really the steward's fault, excellency; the steward should have told her excellency....

"There are larks," she says.

"Those were to go to Lipara to-morrow, excellency, to his excellency the duke!"

The duchess shrugs her shoulders, laughing a little:

"It can't be helped, my friend. His imperial highness the Duke of Xara comes before his excellency, does he not? Make a chaufroid of larks."

Yes, that is what he had thought of doing, but he had not ventured to suggest it. Yes, that would do very well, admirably, excellency.

She gives another little laugh and then nods, to say that he can go. The cook, evidently relieved, bows and disappears. She rises, looks at herself in a mirror as she stands erect in her lazily creased folds of pink and salmon-colour and old lace, stretches her arms with a gesture of utter fatigue and rings for her maid, after which she enters her dressing-room. Does she want to laugh again ... or to cry again? She does not know; but she does know that she has to get dressed.... Whatever confront a person, love or ortolan-pasty, that person must dress, must dress and eat and sleep ... and after that the same again: dress ... and eat ... and sleep....

2

Three carriages, with postillions, bring Othomar, Herman and the others along the broad, winding, switchback road to Castel Vaza. It is five o'clock in the afternoon; the weather is mild and sunny, but not warm: a fresh breeze is blowing. The landscape is wide and noble; with each turn of the road come changes in the panorama of snow-clad mountains. The country is luxuriantly beautiful. The little villages through which they drive look prosperous: they are the duke's property. Between Vaza and the castle the land has been spared by the water: the overflowing of the Zanthos has inundated rather the eastern district. It is difficult here to think constantly of that dreadful flood and of the condition of Lipara yonder, which the emperor has proclaimed in state of siege. It is so beautiful here, so full of spring life; and the sunset after a fine, summery day is here devoid of sadness. The chestnut-trees waft their fresh green fans; and the sky is still like mother-of-pearl, though a dust of twilight is beginning to hover over it. A lively conversation is in progress between the princes, Ducardi and Von Fest, who sit in the first carriage: they talk with animation, laugh and are amused because the villagers sometimes, of course, salute them, as visitors to the castle, with a touch of the cap or a kindly nod, but do not know who they are. Prince Herman nods to a handsome young peasant-girl, who stays staring after them open-mouthed, and recalls the delightful big-game hunt last year when he was the duke's guest, together with the emperor and Othomar. They did not see the duchess that time: she was unwell.... General Ducardi tells anecdotes about the war of fifteen years ago.

And they all find some difficulty in fixing their faces in official folds when they drive through the old, escutcheoned gate over the lowered drawbridge into the long carriage-drive and are received by the chamberlain in the inner courtyard of the castle. This is prescribed by etiquette. The duchess must not show herself before the chamberlain, surrounded by the duke's whole household, has bidden the Duke of Xara welcome in the name of his absent master and offered the crown-prince a telegram from Lipara, which the steward hands him on a silver tray. This telegram is from the Duke of Yemena; it says that his service and that of his son, the Marquis of Xardi, about the person of his majesty the emperor, the Duke of Xara's most gracious father, prevent them from being there to receive their beloved crown-prince in their castle, but that they beg his imperial highness to look upon the house as his. The prince reads the telegram and hands it to his aide-de-camp, the Count of Thesbia. Then, conducted by the chamberlain, he ascends the steps and enters the hall.

Notwithstanding that it is still daylight outside, the hall is brilliantly lighted and resembles a forest full of palm-trees and broad-leaved ornamental plants. The duchess steps towards the crown-prince and breaks the line of her graciousness in a deep curtsey. He has seen her bow like this before. But perhaps she is still handsomer in this plain black velvet gown and Venetian lace, cut very low, her splendid bosom exposed, white with the grain of Carrara marble, her statuesque arms bare, a heavy train behind her like a wave of ink; a small ducal coronet of brilliants and emeralds in her hair, which is also black, with a gold-blue raven's glow.

She bids the princes welcome. Othomar offers her his arm. Prince Herman and the equerries follow them up the colossal staircase, through the hedge of flunkeys, who stand motionless with fixed eyes that do not seem to see. Then through a row of lighted rooms and galleries to a great reception-room, glittering with light from the costly rock-crystal chandelier, in which the candle-light coruscates and casts expansive gleams and shimmers over the marble mosaic of the floor and along the decorative mirrors, in their frames of heavy Louis-XV. arabesques, and the paintings by renascence masters on the walls.

A momentary standing reception is held, a miniature court: in their dazzling uniforms—for it was a delightful, though long drive from Vaza and the men had had time to change into their full-dress uniforms in the town—the equerries and aides come, one after the other, to kiss the duchess' hand; except the Gothlandic officers, she knows them all, nearly all intimately; she is able to speak an almost familiar word to each of them, while the gold of her voice melts between her laughing lips and her great, Egyptian eyes look out, strangely dreaming. So she stands for a moment as a most adorable hostess between the two princes, she, a woman, alone among these officers who surround them, in the midst of a cross-fire of compliments and badinage that sparkles around them all. Then the steward appears, while the doors open out and the table is revealed brightly glittering, and bows before his mistress as a sign that she is served. The duchess takes the crown-prince's arm; the gentlemen follow.

The dinner is very lively. They are an intimate circle, people accustomed to meet one another every day. The duchess sees that an easy tone is preserved, one of light familiarity, which restrains itself before the crown-prince, yet gives a suggestion of the somewhat cavalier roughness and sans-gêne that is the fashionable tone at court. The Gothlandic officers are evidently not in the secret; Von Fest, a giant of a fellow, looks right and left and smiles. For the rest, the duchess possesses this smart, informal manner in a very strong degree, but moderates herself now, although she does sometimes lean both her shapely elbows on the table. The crown-prince once more has that indescribable stiffness which makes things freeze around him; the ease which he displayed at Altara has again made way for something almost constrained and at the same time haughty; his smiles for the duchess are forced; and the handsome hostess in her heart thinks her illustrious guest an insufferable prig.

Possibly Othomar behaves as he does because of the conversations, which all focus themselves about the duchess and concern the gossip of the Imperial; the inundations are hardly mentioned, hardly either the state of siege in the capital; only a single word now and again recalls them. But for the greater part all this seems to be forgotten here, in these delightful surroundings, at this excellent dinner, under the froth of the soft gold lycilian from the duke's private vineyard. This lycilian is celebrated and they also celebrate it now: even the crown-prince touches glasses with the duchess with a courteous word or two, which he utters very ordinarily, but which they seem to think a most witty compliment, for they all laugh with flattering approbation, with glances of intelligence; and the duchess herself no longer thinks him so insufferable, but beams upon him with her full and radiant laugh. But what has he said? He is astounded at himself and at their laughter. He intended nothing but a commonplace; and....

But he remembers: it is always like that; and he now understands. And he thinks them feeble and turns to Ducardi and Von Fest; he forces the conversation and suddenly begins to talk volubly about the condition of the town of Vaza, which also has suffered greatly. Then about Altara. He gives the duchess a long description of the bursting of the Therezia Dyke. The duchess thinks him a queer boy; for an instant she fancies that he is posing; then she decides that for some reason or other he is a little shy; then she thinks that he has fine, soft eyes, looking up like that under his eyelids, and that he has a pleasant way of telling things. She turns right round to him, forgets the officers around her, asks questions and, with her elbows on the table and a goblet of lycilian in her hand, she listens attentively, hangs on the young imperial lips and feels an emotion. This emotion comes because he is so young and august and has those eyes and that voice. She is attracted by his hands, with their broad, delicate shape, as of an old strength of race that is wearing out; she notices that he looks now and then at his ring. And, becoming serious, she talks of the dreadful times, of all those thousands of poor people without a roof over their heads, without anything.... This is, however, only the second moment that she has thought of those thousands; the first was that short half-hour when the duke's chaplain was asking her for money and how she wished it bestowed.... She remembers that, at the time of this conversation with the chaplain, a cutter from Worth's was waiting for her to try on the very dress which she is now wearing and she thinks that life's accidents are really most interesting. She knows, in her inner consciousness, that this philosophy is as the froth of champagne and she herself laughs at it. Then she again listens attentively to Othomar, who is still telling of the nocturnal watch in St. Therezia's Church. The officers have grown quiet and are listening too. His imperial highness has made himself the centre of conversation and dethroned the duchess. She has noticed this too, thinks it strange of him but nice, above all does not know what she wants of him and is charmed.

3

After dinner a cosy gathering in two small drawing-rooms. One of them contains a billiard-table; and the duchess herself, gracefully pointing her cue, which she holds in her jewelled fingers, plays a game with Prince Herman, Leoni and young Thesbia. Sometimes, in aiming, she hangs over the green table with an incredible suppleness in her heavy lines; and the beautiful Carrara breast heaves the Venetian lace and the black velvet up and down at each rapid movement. In the other room, under a lamp of draped lace, Othomar and General Ducardi and the Gothlandic equerries are attentively engaged in studying on an accurately detailed ordnance-map the route which they are to follow to-morrow on horseback to the inundated villages. The steward and a footman go round with coffee and liqueurs.

When the game of billiards is over, the duchess comes into the next room with her gentlemen, laughing merrily. The prince and his officers look up, politely smiling, from their map, but she, bewitchingly:

"Oh, don't let me disturb you, highness!..."

She takes Dutri's arm for a stroll on the terrace outside. The doors are open, the weather is delicious: it is a little cool. The steward hangs a fur cloak over her bare shoulders. On the long terrace outside she walks with Dutri to and fro, to and fro, constantly passing the open doors and as constantly throwing a glance to the group under the lamp: bent heads and fingers that point with a pencil. Her step is light on the arm of the elegant equerry; her train rustles gaily behind her. She talks vivaciously, asks Dutri:

"How are you enjoying your tour?"

"Bored to death! Nothing and nobody amusing, except the primate's secretary!... Those Gothlanders are bores and so terribly provincial! And it's tiring too, all this toiling about! You see, I look upon it as war and so I manage to carry on; if I were to look upon it as times of peace, I should never pull through. Fortunately our reception has been tolerably decent everywhere. Oh, there is no doubt the crown-prince is making himself popular...."

"A nice boy," she says, interrupting him. "I had hardly seen him for a long time since, when he was studying at Altara; after that I only remember seeing him once or twice at the Imperial, shot up from a child like an asparagus-stalk and yet a mere lad. I remember it still: he flushed when I curtseyed to him. Then again lately, at Myxila's...."