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Updated: June 9, 2025
That afternoon the thought of Geoffrey Owen was much with me. Perhaps I summoned it first in a sort of appeal against Hammerfeldt. But I knew in my heart that the two could not be antagonists here.
Are you afraid it'll make Hammerfeldt too angry? Fancy the Princess and your sister! How I shall love to see them!" She dropped her voice as she added, "Do it for me, Cæsar." "Who should have it?" "I don't care. Anybody, so long as he's one of us. Choose somebody good, and then you can defy them all."
They had seen in Hammerfeldt my schoolmaster; his hand was gone, and could no longer guide or restrain me. To one a son, to the other a younger brother, by both I was counted incapable of standing alone or choosing my own path. Hammerfeldt was gone; Wetter remained; the Countess von Sempach remained. There was the new position.
To her, as to Wetter, the death of Hammerfeldt must have seemed the removal of an impediment; only through the curious processes of my own mind did it raise an obstacle insurmountable. She had liked the Prince, but feared him; she imagined my feelings to have been the same, and perhaps in his lifetime they were.
The events of the day before came back to me with an extraordinary vividness of impression, the outcome of nerves strained to an unhealthy sensitiveness. It would have needed but a little self-delusion, a little yielding to the current of my thoughts, to make me see Hammerfeldt by my bed. The Countess and Wetter were in mental image no less plain.
We feel that the exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude healthy creature, to follow his desire might have been an easy thing one which, on a broad view of my life, would have been relatively insignificant. I should have disliked my duty and done it, as I did a thousand things I disliked.
"I am very grateful to the Prince for his care of me," said I. Hammerfeldt came quickly up to me and kissed my hand. "I would make you a true king, sire," said he, and with that he left us. So they took my friend from me, and not all the kindness with which I was loaded in the time following his loss lightened the grief of it.
The King, having been always in frail health, had never married; seeing clearly but not far, he was a sad man: the fate that struck down his brother increased his natural melancholy; he became almost a recluse, withdrew himself from the capital to a retired residence, and henceforward was little more than a name in which Prince von Hammerfeldt conducted the business of the country.
It seems to me that then the Ideal and the Actual joined in battle over me; Hector and Achilles, and I the body of Patroclus! Alas, poor body! Greatly the combatants desire it, little they reck of the roughness it suffers in their struggle! The Spirit and the World am I over-fanciful if I seem to see them incarnated in Geoffrey Owen and old Hammerfeldt? And victory was with the world.
Then Hammerfeldt came in and held me up at the window for a few minutes, telling me to kiss my hand to the people. I did as he told me; then the crowd began to go away, and Krak said it was bedtime. Now here I might conclude the story of my coronation day; but an episode remains trivial and ludicrous enough, yet most firmly embedded in my memory.
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