# The Smart Set/Volume 4/Issue 3/The Queen's Love

from The Smart Set, Vol 4 Iss 3, July 1901, pp. 79-86.
THE QUEEN'S LOVE
By Justus Miles Forman
"Love," sighed the King, "is a divine distemper."
"Your Majesty is ever profound," agreed the Premier; "it is indeed a distemper."
"I said a divine distemper," corrected the King, gently.
The Prime Minister's expression was deferential but stubborn.
"That," said the King, answering an unspoken dissent, "is because you have no soul. What would a mere Prime Minister be doing with a soul, anyhow?"
"Souls have ever been the sole prerogative of kings," murmured the Councillor. "I retract the pun," he added, hastily. "It was perhaps unworthy of me."
The King smiled.
"Unworthy of you?" he queried, with raised brows. "Oh, I don't know," he said, unkindly.
The Minister's color deepened slightly to a rich full-bodied maroon, and the King allowed himself a pleased chuckle.
"Charles, Charles!" he grieved, presently, "you should never cherish evil passions. Your eyes shriek regicide to deafen one, and regicide is so indiscreet. You know what they do to regicides when they catch them, Charles. And they'd catch you easily; you couldn't run. You haven't the waist you once had."
"You have the advantage of me there, sire," said the Premier, viciously; "your Majesty's waist extends from your legs to your royal shoulders."
The King allowed himself another chuckle and held up to the light appreciatively his little glass of eau de vie de Dantzig.
"May I ask, Charles," he inquired, "if you have read the fables of the late M. de La Fontaine?"
The stout gentleman across the table growled.
"Why do you want to drink that stuff?" he demanded. "Why can't you drink whiskey and brandy, like a Christian? You won't have any stomach left at forty."
The King turned the glass between his fingers, and the thousand little particles of gold leaf in the liqueur—if gold leaf it is—sparkled and shimmered in the light.
"My dear, my dear," he protested, gently, "again your limitations! A liqueur fit to wake the blessed Olympians is as far above and beyond you as the divine distemper of love. You have never loved, Charles."
"Thank God!" said the stout gentleman, feelingly.
"Now I—" continued his Majesty.
The Minister allowed himself an obvious sneer.
"—I have a soul; a soul above whiskey and—and materialism."
"A soul for flavored sirups and your neighbor's wife," suggested his companion, helpfully.
The King waved a pained protest.
"You put things so baldly," he complained. "My admiration for the Countess is a matter of affinity. We are kindred souls——"
"I won't believe it of her!" cried the Premier.
"Her husband does not understand her in the least. Her husband is a clod."
"Her husband," observed the Minister, "will some day break his sword-hilt over your august head, and I sha'n't blame him."
"Charles, Charles!" murmured the shocked sovereign, "I should have you tried for lèse-majesté if there were anyone else to quarrel with meanwhile. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be rather fun, anyhow. Mais tiens, tiens, the carriage waits, my lord—I mean the ball. Those poor things can't dance till I come, can they? Run along, Falstaff. We'll find the Queen in the ante-room, and she'll have been waiting half an hour. Lord! what a frame of mind she will be in!"
His Majesty led a very stately and not over-exciting quadrille with the wife of the Russian Ambassador. Afterward he skipped about with the Duchesse de Saint-Martel, and told her that their steps suited perfectly, which was a lie. Then he waltzed with the Queen. "Not that I'm giving you the time of your life," he explained to her, "but this sort of thing seems to be required. Waltzing with you is such a lark, Elena!" he continued, untruthfully. "There is a certain warmth about it, a something of—of abandon, a something of repressed passion."
The Queen favored him with a withering glare, and he chuckled.
When the dance was finished he fled to the little Winter garden with its palms and roses and cool dimness and splashing water. The half-dozen couples in possession of the retreat went out at once, backward, and the King called up one of the two gentlemen-in-waiting who had followed him.
"Find the Countess zu Ehrenstern and bring her here," he said.
The Countess appeared with flattering promptness, and the gentlemen-in-waiting, being discreet gentlemen and some time in service, effaced themselves gracefully.
The Countess was an extremely pretty woman, Russian by birth, yellow haired, with wide-set Tartar eyes and a wicked mouth, a very attractive mouth. Her reputation was no worse than that of a dozen others of the Court set, but her presence bore no odor of sanctity. She had a curiously provocative air with men, a speculative light in her slanting eye, as to say: "Well, what are you going to dare next?"
His Majesty smiled a welcome and the Countess zu Ehrenstern curtsied profoundly, very profoundly, for she had splendid arms and shoulders, and they showed to advantage in a genuflection. The Countess's black gown with the gold spangles might have been called indiscreet. It was undeniably becoming.
The King laughed appreciatively.
"You are immense, Varvara!" he approved. "Come and sit down."
"I have your Majesty's permission?" murmured the Countess.
"You have my Majesty's command," declared the King.
The Countess sat down on the long wicker garden bench where the King had made himself comfortable, and raised both arms to adjust an apparently safe aigrette of tulle and diamonds. She bore the shoulders ever in mind.
His Majesty's eyes showed a strong glint of amusement and he made as if to applaud dumbly. The Countess had the grace to blush.
"The wise fools," observed the King, "who hold that one's little tricks and graces are most successful when they succeed in deceiving, are wrong. Now, if I were a fool, Varvara, I might be quite as fond of you as I am, but I couldn't admire you half so much. You're an artist, Varvara."
"Le Roi s'amuse," murmured the lady, sulkily, and examined with close attention a very much bejeweled hand.
"Natürlich," admitted his Majesty, examining with even closer attention the same hand. "What else is there for a king to do? Though I'm inclined to believe that in this particular case," he continued, examining another hand—"in this particular case amusement is so strongly tinged with something else that it is in danger of becoming—becoming— Fill in the void for me, Varvara."
"I—I (don't know anything about such matters," protested the Countess zu Ehrenstern, unconvincingly.
"You see," complained her sovereign, "a king is such a cabined, cribbed and damnably confined beast! He can't say: 'Tiens, there's a new piece at the Palais Royal that is said to be uncommonly wicked—I'll run up on the Orient Express to Paris to see it;' or, 'There's a new American troupe opening in London next week—I'll go see if it is as good as it ought to be.' He can't go and play at Monte Carlo as he'd like to. It would make a tremendous row. He can't spend a month or two at Shepheard's during the season, to see the pretty American girls that talk through their noses. He can't do anything that other men of spirit and sporting tastes spend their lives doing. He's a king, and that means a graven image who isn't supposed to care about anything but signing bills and quarreling with fool advisers. And the worst of it is, nobody even asked me if I wanted to be a king. It isn't fair. However," continued his Majesty, slowly, looking into the eyes of the Countess zu Ehrenstern, "there are compensations."
"Is it nothing to be able to command, sire? Your Majesty is monarch of all you survey," murmured the Countess, dropping her eyes.
The King surveyed his monarchy with interest.
"Why, then," said he, "why, then, it's quite time I took possession."
"Heavens! not there!" cried the Countess. "Powder comes off, as you ought to know by this time. There is—" she hesitated, "there is nothing on my lips."
"That," said the King, "can be remedied."
It was.
"As I said not long since," pursued his Majesty, after a pause, "there are compensations for the troubles of a poor monarch."
The Countess appeared to be regaining her breath.
"But you have no idea of what a stupid life I lead, Varvara. If it weren't for you I believe I'd cut it and run. Of course, there's Charles. I derive some satisfaction from baiting Charles; but that grows monotonous."
"The Duke?" she inquired.
"The Duke, precisely. Charles was unkind enough this evening to predict that your excellent husband would one day break a sword hilt over my august head. Charles is at times shockingly plain-spoken."
The Countess giggled. "What are you going to do about the Count?" she asked, presently. "Charles isn't bright, I know, but then—well, he isn't exactly a fool, either."
"Oh, we'll send Uriah to the wars," said the King. "We'll put him in the forefront of the battle. If it's necessary, we will get up a war for his special benefit. Never you fear, we'll dispose of Uriah."
"You—you don't leave one any breath," said the Countess, after a pause, panting a little.
"You shouldn't have such a mouth," complained his Majesty. "It's a—a living dare; and—well, I dare a good deal, you know."
The water purled and splashed in the green darkness behind them. Now and then a little puff of wind came in through the open windows beyond the fountain and stirred the long palm leaves and brought a cool fragrance of roses and mignonette. In the ballroom the orchestra was playing "Morgenblätter." The music came into the Winter garden faintly, mingled with the murmur of voices and the clink of sabres.
The King was watching the face of the Countess zu Ehrenstern. It held a curiously interesting expression. She smiled slightly, her eyes were very wide, and there was an unwonted light in them, a gleam of excitement.
"Would you dare a good deal?" she demanded, turning the excited eyes on her sovereign; "would you, sire?" She waved a comprehensive hand about her. "Then chuck it!" she said, simply.
The King drew a long breath and another and another.
"Good God!" he gasped, "do you mean it, Varvara? Do you mean it? Good God!"
The Tartar eyes gleamed in the half-darkness.
"Oh, I mean it, mon Roi!" she whispered. "I mean it! Think! no more papers to sign—no more troops to review—no more cornerstones to lay and speeches to make—no more sitting in a gold cage and looking hungrily through the bars at the blessed common world outside—no more form, ceremony, limitations, but the wide, wide world, mon Roi, with all it holds—the wide, wide world like a draught of wine—and me!"
She threw up her white arms restlessly, eagerly, as if she were about to take wing, and the Tartar eyes danced riotously.
"Heart of God, what a dare!" said the King, under his breath. "Soul of Mary, what a life!"
He took the face of the Countess between shaking palms and held it close to his. His eyes burned it.
"Would you do it?" he cried. "Are you brave enough, Varvara? Oh, yes, you'd run away with the King. Anybody would run away with the King; but think a bit. Out there, beyond the bars, I shouldn't be a king, you know, but just a common man—a man who wouldn't dare show his face too conspicuously. A common man, understand; not a king. Have you the courage for that, Varvara? Here you're glad enough to—to be favored by the King. Out there you'd be a runaway, with no one to envy you. Have you the nerve for that, my Tartar?"
She threw the white arms about his neck. Something moved and quivered inside him at their warm touch, and her face glowed in the dusk against his.
"Look at me!" said the Countess. "Do you see any doubt in me? Do you see any fear in me? They say you know women. Did you think I loved the King? Ah, Louis, Louis! my man, my big, fierce man! didn't you know it was you? No king, Louis; you, you!"
The King swung about and dropped his face into his hands. The muscles and played strange of it twitched tricks.
"Let me think," he said; "give me a moment to think."
The world outside the gold bars smiled and beckoned. Sunshine, the odor of roses, Spring winds over the grass wakening the blood in the veins, and freedom, freedom! Great God, what freedom means to a caged soul!
Varvara's breath was on his cheeks. He felt the throb of her heart fast and strong against his arm. The smell of her hair was in his nostrils. The lift of her breathing, the perfume of her, the sway of her passion touched his blood, mounted to his head.
"Listen!" he said, swiftly. "There's a train leaves Freistadt, northbound, at 2.17 in the morning. It stops, on signal, at the Schloss private station down beyond the gardens half an hour later. Go home in an hour or so. The ball won't be over till three o'clock. Leave word for the Count that you aren't well; he'll stay till the end. Then meet me at the inner gate of the Italian garden, back of the Neptune fountains, at two o'clock. If anything turns up to keep me I'll send you word. Otherwise I will be there promptly at two. Bring a bag, but no servant, no maid."
He drew a long breath as one who has taken his plunge. His hands clasped and unclasped nervously.
"Uriah will have to stand it as best he can," he said, lightly. "As for me, I think no one will die of grief. My heaven! to be free—free! Charles will make a few philosophic remarks. Charles fancies himself at philosophy. The Chamber will meet and take solemn action. The papers will gloat—for a week. Elena will—Elena will—Elena——"
He broke off, frowning. "It's a damned low trick on Elena!" he said, slowly, as if to himself.
The Countess laughed shortly.
"Ah, the Queen will cry her eyes out," she said, with some asperity. "She adores you. I watched you dancing with her to-night. Good Lord, one might as well dance with a dummy! She's an iceberg—a mediæval graystone saint—a—a——"
"I think," said the King, gently, "that we will leave the Queen out of it, if you don't mind, Varvara, She—she is the Queen, you know. Perhaps we haven't been quite ideal lovers. Perhaps it's been my fault. Perhaps—well, she will reign wisely. It's a damned low trick on Elena!" he concluded, slowly, as if to himself.
The Countess stirred uneasily in her seat and murmured something unintelligible. She felt that she had made a false step, had struck a wrong note.
Then one of the gentlemen-in-waiting appeared from the ballroom, making a discreet amount of noise as he approached.
"The Queen is asking for your Majesty," he said.
The King rose at once. "Two o'clock," he whispered, adding, aloud: "Von Altdorf, I must leave the Countess zu Ehrenstern in your care. I am treating you, on the whole, better than you deserve."
The Countess curtsied, and Von Altdorf bowed abjectly.
At the door of the royal private apartments the King and Queen dismissed their ladies- and gentlemen-in-waiting.
"Go back and amuse yourselves, mes souris," said his Majesty. "The cats are tactfully out of hearing. Night, Elena," he said at the Queen's suite. "Sweet dreams, though you won't have them after that langouste mayonnaise."
The Queen gave him her hand, and a little tired smile that followed him to his own rooms and stayed unpleasantly in his mind, while he packed a Gladstone bag and transacted certain business with a combination American safe built into the wall of his study.
He stood over the filled bag before closing it, and wondered how many indispensable articles had been omitted. He was unaccustomed to packing his own luggage.
"A flask," he said—"now where the deuce is that silver filigree flask the Emperor gave me? I believe Elena has it."
He went out of the room and down the little passage that led to the Queen's chambers.
The door of her dressing-room stood open, there being no fear of intrusion, and let a bar of light out across the red carpet of the corridor.
He hesitated a moment, then looked in, diffidently. The Queen was entirely alone. She had been taking off the many jewels she had worn at the ball and laying them in a silver jewel casket that stood open on the table by her side. She was better without them. People said she was the most beautiful woman in the royal circles of Europe, not excepting the three Orléans sisters. She wore a close-fitting gown of white covered with silver and pearl embroidery. It clung to her gorgeous figure tenderly, making every perfection evident without vulgarizing it. Her head, with its crown of black hair, its sombre, perfect beauty, is as familiar in every corner of the world through the public prints and photographs as was that of the martyred Empress of Austria. Indeed, their types are strangely alike, as everyone knows.
Out in the corridor the King stirred uneasily, and wavered between entering and stealing back unseen to his own rooms. He felt rather like an eavesdropper, a Peeping Tom.
The Queen sang under her breath a snatch of song, a sad little, quaint little nursery ballad of old France. She looked tired, infinitely—not physically tired merely, but sad, unhappy.
To the King out in the corridor it came all at once how wonderfully, unspeakably beautiful his wife was, and how hopelessly apart they had lived during their two years of marriage. It came to him that she might have been lonely all this time, that her coldness, her aloofness, might have been cloaking a sad heart and an empty life.
"Ah, well," sighed the King, "I haven't been quite hilarious myself, but thank God it's over with. To-morrow life begins," and he knocked at the open door and entered.
"Looking for a flask, Elena," he apologized—"a silver-and-glass flask. It occurred to me that you borrowed it a week or so ago. Happen to have it in sight? Don't bother, you know."
The Queen looked about the room, on the tables and in some drawers.
"I remember very well borrowing it, Louis," she said, "and I'm sure it's about, but heaven knows where. Wait a moment—I'll call a maid."
"No, don't," said the King; "it isn't of any consequence, really. I must have a dozen of them about. I'll look one up."
He fingered the blazing diamonds in the jewel case absently.
"Did you—did you have a pleasant evening with the—Countess?" asked the Queen.
His Majesty looked up in surprise. There was a distinct bitterness in the tone. He had not believed that she cared enough to be bitter or even piqued.
"Oh, yes," he said, indifferently. "The Countess is a woman of some wit. She's a tongue in her head, really. Well—good-night. Never mind about the flask."
The Queen threw up a hand and turned her head. "Wait," she cried, softly. "Listen." The music from the ballroom below and in the far wing of the Schloss came up through the night, made very faint and sweet by distance.
"'Fleurs de l'Amour,'" breathed the Queen, with closed eyes and a little, tender smile at her lips, and a rosy, faltering blush of girlhood spreading upward. "'Fleurs de l'Amour!' Ah, Louis, do you remember?—they played it that evening at Homburg when you—you asked me to be a queen. It was a cold business, Louis, wasn't it?—and there haven't been many fleurs de l'amour in our lives. But a girl doesn't forget her proposals. Ah, well, good-night, Louis; sleep well."
She turned away wearily and sank into the big stuffed chair by the table. But the King lingered, still touching the diamonds and sapphires in the jewel box.
Then suddenly he pushed over a little footstool to the side of the chair and dropped upon it. He twice opened his mouth to speak, and twice hesitated. Then all at once: "How beautiful you are, Elena!" he said, simply; "how wonderfully beautiful you are!" And the Queen turned suddenly crimson and hid her face.
"No," he went on, presently, "we haven't made a good thing of it, have we? We haven't seemed to hit it off at all. I wonder—I wonder if we've ever tried. It was—as you say—a cold business, from the first. One doesn't often marry for love in our rank, but I wonder—I wonder if we've ever really tried. Whose fault is it? I suppose we each would promptly confess to it." He laughed a little, mirthlessly. "But each would be thinking all the time that it is really the fault of the other."
He took one of her hands in both of his and stroked it thoughtfully. The touch of it gave him a curious, unexpected thrill. He looked up swiftly, with puzzled eyes.
"Am I crazy to-night?" he demanded of himself, scornfully. But the thrill refused to depart.
The Queen turned her face to him again, and the hand in his clasp stirred a little, tremulously.
"Fault?" she said, slowly. "I don't know, Louis. I honestly don't know. I suppose you thought I was hopelessly cold and unfeeling and aloof, and I suppose I thought you were hopelessly taken up with—with your other friends—countesses and the like—don't be angry, Louis—and hadn't time to give a thought to me—weren't you, Louis, weren't you? And then, too, my friend, there's something else, something that is hard for a man to realize, of course—the shock, the outraged sensibilities of a young girl thrown into a loveless marriage. You can't figure to yourself how such a girl feels, Louis; you mustn't blame her if she draws back into her shell in an agony of humiliation, of bitterness, of shame."
She turned about in the chair and leaned close over him, where he sat at her feet, and gave her other hand to his clasp. A wave of black hair, loosened when she had taken off her tiara, slipped down and fell across his face.
The thrill within him became a storm that shook him bodily, a vertigo that whirled the room before his eyes.
"Oh, man, man!" he groaned, inwardly, "are you mad? Why, man, fool, your bag is all packed in that room yonder, to run away with another woman to Paris; to freedom, man!—blessed, blessed, careless freedom, and with a woman who loves you!"
But all at once the blessed freedom seemed to him undesirable, rather silly. It came to him that he would be homesick after a little, sick for the Court, for the shooting in the Winter, for his friendly quarrels with Charles. He thought of the slant Tartar eyes and wicked mouth of the Countess zu Ehrenstern. Then he ventured a look upward into the beautiful face above him. His very flesh crept as if he had offered a shameful insult to the Queen in thinking of a comparison.
The filmy lace of the curtains at the open window swayed and wavered inward with the cool night breeze from the gardens, and on the breeze came again, faint and sweet, the old refrain from the ballroom:
Faith that liveth forever,
Rose, my rose, of love.
Hearts that will sever never.
Flowers, ah——
"I suppose you are right," said the King. "I suppose I never considered that part of it, never made allowance for what you might be feeling. It was such a matter of business! How should I understand, anyhow? You see, Elena, I've never loved anyone." Then, inwardly, "Great heaven! what is the matter with me? I want to kiss her hands! She'd die of the shock. What is the matter with me?"
"Never loved anyone?" she said. "Do you think I am a child, Louis? Do you think that the things you do never reach my ears? Don't let us be absurd!"
"By all the saints, it's the truth!" he cried, standing over her. "I've never lied to you—and—and—whatever they may say," he went on, more diffidently, "I've never wronged you, either. On my soul, I've never loved any woman! Oh, of course, I don't mean that I've—I've never—well, I'm a human being—that I've never felt any sort of an emotion for my—my countesses, as you delicately put it just now, but bless you, I'd have felt the same interest in their maids if they had happened to be good-looking enough. If only one hadn't an absurd prejudice in favor of one's own class!"
He walked up and down the room with his hands clasped behind him and his brows lowering.
"I'm not well," he said to himself. "I've a strange desire to do all sorts of absurd things. My mind is weakening."
He dropped again to the little footstool at the Queen's feet and took her hands in his.
He wanted to tell her that he felt a curious trembling weakness coming on, and that he must be off to bed, but he looked into her face with a certain childlike wonder, a dawning surprise, and said only, "What wonderful eyes you have, Elena! what wonderful eyes!"
The eyes hid themselves swiftly, but the King found himself holding her two hands to his cheek. He realized his actions very dimly in the midst of the fever, the strange madness, the breaking up of heaven and earth that surged in him and would not be mastered.
"Tell me," he said, unsteadily, "have you ever loved anyone, Elena?"
"Yes!" cried the Queen, "great God, yes!" and she drew away from him and rose and stood at some little distance, hiding her face in her hands.
The fever and storm and whirl of things dropped away from him like a garment. He laid his throbbing head against the arm of the chair that she had quitted. He did not know that his lips clung to the flowered silk, warm where her arm had lain.
"She loves someone else," he said to himself, very slowly, that he might realize what the fact meant to him. "She loves someone else, and she's sorry for me. She doesn't want to cause me pain. Now I've tried to save her pain in the last two years, haven't I? Ah, you brute, you low brute! She's the only thing in all the green earth, and I've thrown her away, thrown her away deliberately, for—countesses!"
The Tartar eyes and wicked mouth of Varvara zu Ehrenstern came before him again, and he shivered from head to foot.
"Dearest, dearest!" he breathed, softly, with his cheek against the flowered silk of the big chair, "I've been mad—blind—possessed of devils, but how I love you—how I must love you all my life long!"
A little sob from the woman across the room brought him to his feet.
"Then," said the King, very sadly, "I have lost you, as God knows I deserve. Be a little sorry for me, Elena, for, by my soul and body I love you so that I think I must die of my love!" and he dropped on one knee and kissed the hem of her skirt.
Then, when he would have left her, the Queen turned a white face to him.
"Oh, are you blind, Louis?" she breathed.
This work was published before January 1, 1930, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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