Majesty Part 34

"About Berengar and myself. I have been contrasting myself with him, papa. We are brothers, we are both your sons. Which of us, do you think, takes most after you ... and ... our ancestors?"

"What are you driving at, Othomar?"

"At what is right, papa: right and just. Nature is sometimes unjust and blind; she ought to have let Berengar be born first and me next ... or even left me out altogether."

"Once more, what are you driving at, Othomar?"

"Can't you see, papa? I will tell you. Is Berengar not more of a monarch than I am? Is that not why he's your favourite? And ought I to deprive him of his natural rights for the sake of my traditional rights? I want to abdicate in his favour, papa. I want to abdicate everything, all my rights."

"The boy's mad," muttered Oscar.

"All my rights," repeated Othomar, dreamily, as though he foresaw the future: his little brother crowned.

"Othomar, are you raving?" asked the emperor.

"Papa, I am not raving. What I am now telling you I have thought over for days, perhaps weeks; I don't know: time pa.s.ses so quickly.... What I am telling you I have discussed with mamma: it made her cry, but she did not oppose me. She looks at it as I do.... And what I tell you holds good; I have made up my mind and nothing can make me change it.... I am fond of Berengar; I am glad to give up everything to him; and I shall pray that he may become happy through my gift. I am convinced--and so are you--that Berengar will make a better emperor than I. What talent do I possess for ruling?..."

He shrugged his shoulders in helplessness, with a nervous shudder that jolted them:

"None," he answered himself. "I have no talent, I can do nothing. I do not know how to decide--as now--nor how to act; I shall always be a dreamer. Why then should I be emperor and he nothing more than the commander-in-chief of my army or my fleet? Surely that can't be right; that can't have been what nature intended.... Papa, I give it him, my birthright, and I ... I shall know how to live, if I must...."

The emperor had listened to him with his elbows on the table and his hands under his chin and now sat staring at him with his small, pinched eyes:

"Do you mean all this?" he asked.

"Yes, papa."

"You're not delirious?"

"No, papa, I'm not delirious."

"Then you're mad."

The emperor rose:

"Then you're mad, I tell you. Othomar, realize that you're mad and return to your senses; don't become quite insane."

"Why do you call me insane, papa? _Can't_ you agree with me that Berengar would be better than I?"

His father's cruel glances stabbed Othomar through and through:

"No, you're not insane in that; you're right there...."

"And why, then, am I insane because I wish, for that reason, to abdicate in his favour?"

"Because it's impossible, Othomar."

"What law prevents me?"

"My will, Othomar."

The prince drew himself up proudly:

"Your will?" he cried. "Your will? You acknowledge that I am nothing of a prince except by birth? You acknowledge that Berengar does possess your capacity for ruling and you will not, you _will_ not have me abdicate? And you think that I shall fall in with that will?..."

He uttered a hoa.r.s.e laugh:

"No, papa, I shall pay no heed to that will. You can carry through your will in everything, but not in this. Though you called out your whole army, you could not prevail against me here. There is a limit to the power of human will, papa, and nothing, nothing, nothing can prevent me from considering myself unfit to reign and from _refusing_ to wear a crown!"

The emperor seized Othomar's wrists; his hot breath hissed in Othomar's face:

"You d.a.m.ned cub!" he snarled between his large, white teeth. "You wretched nincomp.o.o.p! You're right: there's nothing of the emperor in you; there never will be. If I didn't know better, I'd say you were the son of a footman. You're right, you're incompetent. You're nothing: our crown doesn't fit you. And yet, though I had to lock you up in a prison, so that no one might hear of your baseness, you shall _not_ abdicate your rights. My will extends farther than you can see. Do you hear? You shan't do it, you shan't resign, though from this moment onwards I have to hide you, as a disgrace, from the world. Your slack brain can't understand that, can it? You can't understand that I'm fonder of Berengar than of a poltroon like you and that nevertheless I won't have him as my successor in your stead? Then I shall have to tell you. I won't have it, so as not to let the world see the degeneration of our race. I will not have the world know how pitiably we have deteriorated in you; and I would rather ... I would rather murder you than allow you to abdicate!"

Fiercely Oscar took the prince by his shoulders, pushed him backwards on a couch, on which Othomar sank in a huddled att.i.tude, while his father continued to hold him like a prey in the grip of his strong hands:

"But I tell you," continued the emperor, "I tell you, you are _not_ the son of a footman, you are my son; and I shall not murder you, because I am your father. I will only say this to you, Othomar: you might have spared me this. I believe you have a high opinion of your own delicacy of feeling, but you have not the very least feeling. You do not even feel that you have been contemplating a villainy, the villainy of a proletarian, a slave, a pariah, a wretch. You have not felt even for an instant the pain you would cause me by such an infamy. You saw that I was fonder of your brother; you thought that I should approve of your cowardly proposal. Not for a moment did the thought occur to you that, with that cowardice of yours, you would give _me_ the greatest pain that I could ever experience!..."

Othomar, utterly crushed, had fallen back upon the couch. He was no longer able to distinguish what was just and what was true; he no longer knew himself at that minute; his father's words lashed his soul like whips. And he felt no strength within him to resist them: the insulting reproaches kept him down, as though he had been thrashed. Infamy and disgrace, insanity and degeneration: he collapsed beneath them; he gulped down the mud of them, till he felt like suffocating. And that he did not suffocate and continued to breathe, continued to live, that the light was bright around him, that things remained unchanged, that the outside world knew nothing: all this was despair to him. For a moment he thought of his mother. But he wished for darkness, for death, to hide himself, himself and his shame, his degeneration, the leprosy of his pariah-temperament.... It flashed through him in the second after that last lash of reproach, flashed across his despondent soul. He knew that Oscar always kept a loaded revolver in an open pigeon-hole of his writing-table. His brain grew tense in the effort of thinking how to reach it. He rose, approached the pigeon-hole; suddenly he sprang towards it, stretched out his hand and seized the pistol....

Did Oscar believe that his son had been driven mad by his last words and now wanted his father's life? Did he perceive this ecstasy of suicide in his offspring, was his quivering brain penetrated by the horrible thought that self-destruction would be the pariah's last refuge? Be this as it might, he rushed at Othomar. But the prince lightly leapt out of his reach, pointed the revolver, with wild eyes, with distorted features, in senseless despair, upon himself, upon his own forehead, on which the veins swelled blue....

"Othomar!" roared the emperor.

At this moment hurried footsteps were heard outside, confused words sounded in the anteroom and the Marquis of Xardi, the emperor's aide-de-camp, alarmed and flurried, threw the door wide open....

"Sir!" he exclaimed. "The empress asks if your majesty will come to Prince Berengar this instant...."

The shot had gone off, into the wall. Blood dripped from Othomar's ear.

The emperor had caught hold of the crown-prince and torn the revolver, still loaded in five chambers, from him; a second shot went off in that brief moment of struggle, into the ceiling, Othomar remained standing vacantly.

"Marquis!" the emperor hissed out at Xardi. "I don't know what you think, but I tell you this: you've seen nothing, you think nothing. What happened here before you came in ... did not happen."

He pointed his finger, threateningly at Xardi:

"Should you ever forget, marquis, that it did not happen, then I shall forget who you are, though your pedigree dates back farther than ours!"

Xardi stood deathly pale before his emperor:

"My G.o.d, sir!..."

"What do you mean by entering your sovereign's room in this unmannerly fas.h.i.+on? Even the Duke of Xara has himself announced, marquis!"

"Sir...."

"What? Speak up!..."

"Her majesty...."

"Well, her majesty?"