The Princess Virginia Part 17

White moths, happily ignorant that summer would come no more for them, drifted out from the shadows like rose petals blown by the soft wind.

On a trellis, a crowding sisterhood of pale roses drooped their heads downward _in memento mori_. It was a silver night; a night of enchantment.

Leopold had meant to take Virginia out only to see the moon rise over the water, turning the great smooth sheet of jet into a silver s.h.i.+eld; for there had been clouds or spurts of rain on other nights, and he had said to himself that never again, perhaps, would they two stand together under the white spell of the moon. He had meant to keep her for five minutes, or ten at the most, and then to bring her back; but they had walked down to the path which girdled the cliff above the lake. The moon touched her golden hair and her pure face like a benediction. He dared not look at her thus for long, and when there came a sudden quick rustling in the gra.s.s at their feet, he bent down, glad of any change in the current of his thoughts.

Some tiny, winged thing of the night sought a lodging in a bell-shaped flower whose blue color the moon had drunk, and as Leopold stooped, the same impulse made Virginia bend.

He stretched out his hand to gather the low-growing branch of blossoms, which he would give the girl as a souvenir of this hour, and their fingers met. Lake and garden swam before the eyes of the Princess as the Emperor's hand closed over hers.

Her great moment had come; yet now that it was here, womanlike she wished it away--not gone forever, oh no, but waiting just round the corner of the future.

"The flowers are yours--I give them to you," she laughed, as if she fancied it was in eagerness to grasp the disputed spray that he had pressed her fingers.

"You are the one flower I want--flower of all the world," he answered, in a choked voice, speaking words he had not meant to speak; but the ice barriers that held back the torrent of which he had told her, had melted long ago and now had been swept away. Other barriers which he had built up in their place--his convictions, his duty as a man at the head of a nation--were gone too. "I love you," he stammered, "I love you far better than my life, which you saved. I've loved you ever since our first hour together on the mountain, but every day my love has grown a thousand fold, until now it's greater and higher than any mountain. I can fight against myself no longer. I thought I was strong, but this love is stronger than I am. Say that you care for me--only say that."

"I do care," Virginia whispered. She had prayed for this, lived for this, and she was drowning in happiness. Yet she had pictured a different scene, a scene of storm and stress. She had heard in fancy broken words of sorrow and n.o.ble renunciation on his lips, and in antic.i.p.ating his suffering she had felt the joy her revelation would give. "I care--so much, so much! How hard it will be to part."

"If you care, then we shall not be parted," said Leopold.

The Princess looked up at him in wonder, holding back as he would have caught her in his arms. What could he mean? What plan was in his mind that, believing her to be Helen Mowbray, yet made it possible for him to rea.s.sure her so?

"I don't understand," she faltered. "You are the Emperor, and I am no more than--"

"You are my wife, if you love me."

In the shock of her ecstatic surprise she was helpless to resist him longer, and he held her close and pa.s.sionately, his lips on her hair, her face crushed against his heart. She could hear it beating, feel it throb under her cheek. His wife? Then he loved her enough for that.

Yet how was it possible for him to stand ready, for her sake, to override the laws of his own land?

"My darling--my wife!" he said again. "To think that you love me."

"I have loved you from the first," the Princess confessed, "but I was afraid you would feel, even if you cared, that we must say good-by.

Now--" And in an instant the whole truth would have been out; but the word "good-by" stabbed him, and he could not let it pa.s.s.

"We shall not say good-by, not for an hour," he cried. "After this I could not lose you. There's nothing to prevent my being your husband, you my wife. Would to G.o.d you were of Royal blood, and you should be my Empress--the fairest Empress that poet or historian ever saw--but we're prisoners of Fate, you and I. We must take the goods the G.o.ds provide. My G.o.ddess you will always be, but the Empress of Rhaetia, even my love isn't powerful enough to make you. If I am to you only half what you are to me, you'll be satisfied with the empire of my heart."

Suddenly the warm blood in Virginia's veins grew chill. It was as if a wind had blown up from the dark depths of the lake, to strike like ice into her soul. An instant more and he would have known that she was a Princess of the Blood, and through his whole life she could have gone on wors.h.i.+ping him because he had been ready to break down all barriers for her love, before he guessed there need be none to break. Now her warm impulse of grat.i.tude was frozen by the biting blast of disillusionment; but still there was hope left. It might be that she misunderstood him. She would not judge him yet.

"The empire of your heart," she echoed. "If that were mine I should be richer than with all the treasures of the earth. If you were Leo, the chamois hunter, I would love you as I love you now, because in yourself you are the one man for me; and I'd go with you to the end of the world, as your wife. But you're not the chamois hunter; you are the man I love, yet you are the Emperor. Being the Emperor, had you talked of a hopeless love and a promise not to forget, having nothing else to give me, because of your high destiny and my humbler one, I could still have been happy. Yet you speak of more than that. You speak of something I can't understand. It seems to me that what a Royal man offers the woman he loves should be all or nothing."

"I do offer you all," said Leopold. "All myself, my life, the heart and soul of me--all that's my own to give. The rest--belongs to Rhaetia."

"Then what do you mean by--"

"Don't you understand, my sweet, that I've asked you to be my wife?

What can a man ask more of a woman?"

"Your wife--but not the Empress. How can the two be apart?"

He tried to take her once more in his arms, but when he saw that she would not have it so, he held his love in check, and waited. He was sure that he would not need to wait long, for not only had he laid his love at her feet, but had pledged himself to a tremendous sacrifice on love's altar.

The step which in a moment of pa.s.sion he had now resolved to take would create dissension among his people, alienate one who had been his second father, rouse England, America and Germany to anger, because of the Princess whose name rumor had already coupled with his, and raise in every direction a storm of disapproval. When this girl whom he loved realized the immensity of the concession he was making because of his reverent love for her, she would give her life to him, now and forever.

Tenderly he took her hand and lifted it to his lips; then, when she did not draw it away (because he was to have his chance of explanation) he held it between both his own, as he talked on.

"Dearest one," he said, "when I first knew I loved you--loved you as I didn't dream I could love a woman--for your sake and my own, I would have avoided meeting you too often. This I tell you frankly. I didn't see how, in honor, such a love could end except in despair for me, and sorrow even for you, if you should come to care. Had you and Lady Mowbray stayed on at the hotel in Kronburg, I think I could have held to my resolve. But when Baroness von Lyndal suggested your coming here, my heart leaped up. I said in my mind, 'At least I shall have the joy of seeing her every day, for a time, without doing anything to darken her future. Afterwards, when she has gone out of my life, I shall have that radiance to remember. And so no harm will be done in the end, except that I shall have to pay, by suffering.' Still, I had no thought of the future without a parting; I felt that inevitable.

And the suffering came hand in hand with the joy, for not a night here at Lyndalberg have I slept. If I had been weak, I should have groaned aloud in the agony of renunciation.

"My rooms open on a lawn. More than once I've come out into the darkness, when all the household was sleeping. Some times I have walked to this very spot where you and I stand now--heart to heart for the first time, my darling--asking myself whether there were any way out of the labyrinth. It was not until I brought you here and saw you by my side with the moon rays for a crown, that a flash of blinding light seemed to pierce the clouds. Suddenly I saw all things clearly, and though there will be difficulties, I count them as overcome."

"Still you haven't answered my question," said Virginia in a low, strained voice.

"I'm coming to that now. It was best that you should know first all that's been troubling my heart and brain during these few, bitter-sweet days which have taught me so much. You know, men who have their place at the head of great nations can't think first of themselves, or even of those they love better than themselves. If they hope to s.n.a.t.c.h at personal happiness, they must take the one way open to them, and be thankful.

"Don't do me the horrible injustice to believe that I wouldn't be proud to show you to my subjects as their Empress; but instead, I can offer only what men of Royal blood for hundreds of years have offered to women whom they honored as well as loved. You must have heard even in England of what is called a morganatic marriage? It is that I offer you."

With a cry of pain--the cruel pain of wounded, disappointed love--the Princess tore her hand from his.

"Never!" she exclaimed. "It's an insult."

"An insult? No, a thousand times no. I see that even now you don't understand."

"I think that I understand very well, too well," said Virginia, brokenly. The beautiful fairy palace of happiness that she had watched as it grew, lay shattered, destroyed in the moment which ought to have seen its triumphant completion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _"Never!" she exclaimed. "It's an insult"_]

"I tell you that you cannot understand, or you wouldn't say--you wouldn't dare to say, my love--that I'd insulted you. Don't you see, don't you know, that you would be my wife in the sight of all men, as well as in the sight of G.o.d."

"Your wife, you call it!" the Princess gave a harsh little laugh which hurt as tears could not hurt. "You seem to have strange ideas of that word, which has always been sacred to me. A morganatic marriage! That is a mere pretense, an hypocrisy. I would be 'your wife,' you say. I would give you all my love, all my life. You, in return, would give me--your left hand. And you know well that, in a country which tolerates such a one-sided travesty of marriage, the laws would hold you free to marry another woman--a Royal woman, whom you could make an Empress--as free as if I had no existence."

"Great Heaven, that you should speak so!" he broke out. "What if the law did hold me free? Can you dream--do you put me so low as to dream that my heart would hold me free? My soul would be bound to you forever."

"So you may believe, now. But the knowledge that you could change would be death to me--a death to die daily. Yes, I tell you again, it was an insult to offer a lot so miserable, so contemptible, to a woman you profess to love. How could you do it? If only you had never spoken the hateful words! If only you had left me the ideal I had of you--n.o.ble, glorious, above the whole world of men. But after all you are selfish,--cruel. If you had said 'I love you, yet we must part, for Duty stands between us.' I could--but no, I can never tell you now what I could have answered if you had said that, instead of breaking my heart."

Under the fire of her reproach he stood still, his lips tight, his shoulders braced, as if he held his breast open for the knife.

"By Heaven, it is you who are cruel," he said at last. "How can I make you see your injustice?"

"In no way. There's nothing more to be said between us two after this, except--good-by."

"It shall not be good-by."

"It must. I wish it."

He had caught her dress as she turned to go, but now he released her.

"You wish it? It's not true that you love me, then?"

"It was true. Everything--everything in my whole life--is changed from this hour. It would be better if I'd never seen you. Good-by."