The two empresses sat side by side. Valérie held Elizabeth gently in her arms; at regular intervals the guns boomed from the fort, through the palace...
Then Elizabeth drew herself up painfully from her daughter-in-law's arms and spoke in low, oracular tones:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara.... He would so much have liked to see a Count of Lycilia...."
The guns boomed; the two empresses, in deep mourning, wept and sobbed. And now for the first time after a long interval--as there had also been a long interval at Berengar's death--Elizabeth realized all her loss, her sorrow, her misery, her despair; and she felt that that emperor, to whom, as a very young princess, now four-and-twenty years ago, she had been given in marriage, without love, she had come to love in this quarter of a century of their life in common on his high pinnacle of sovereignty....
That evening Othomar returned and, alone with his wife, with his mother, he sobbed with them, the young emperor, whom no one had seen weeping in the cathedral at Altara. For the Empress Elizabeth had repeated yet once more:
"If it's a son ... it will be a Duke of Xara...."
And then the Emperor of Liparia had 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?
And then with irrepressible sobs, suddenly overwhelmed by the menace of the future, he sobbed out his grief for his father who had been and his son who was to be! He sobbed, with his head in the arms of his young empress, who, suddenly realizing that she must comfort him, had grown calm and looked calmly down upon him, taking their life of majesty upon her shoulders as though it were an oppressive, heavy mantle of purple and ermine and nothing more, taking it up so valiantly because there flowed in her veins as in his one single drop of sacred golden blood, common to all of their order, their might upon earth and their right before God....
"To HER IMPERIAL AND ROYAL HIGHNESS EUDOXIE "ARCHDUCHESS OF AUSTRIA, "SIGISMUNDINGEN.
"I cannot tell you how your letter pained me. For God's sake, do not excite yourself so and say such terrible things. We too regretted intensely that you could not be present at our coronation and that your rheumatic fever obliged you to remain at Sigismundingen; but why need you, dear mother, look upon that fever as a punishment from God? And why need you look upon it as a punishment from God that you did not see your fondest illusion fulfilled and were not able to be present in our old cathedral when Othomar, after being crowned by the primate, with his own hands crowned me Empress of Liparia? You were not there, but yet it came about: your illusion is truth, after all. And I tell you this without the least, oh, believe me, without the _least_ bitterness!... A punishment for forcing me, against my will? You must be ill indeed, ill in body and mind, poor mother, to be able to write like that: it makes me smile a little, I no longer recognize you. And let my smile bear witness that I am not unhappy: oh, far from it! Our happiness is hardly ever what we ourselves intend it to be and what we regret that it is not....