nd before she even dared to
speak to Othomar she humbled herself before the archbishop. The prelate,
alarmed at these portents in the mysterious melancholy of the Imperial,
had scarcely known how to comfort her. After that, she remained
prostrate for hours before her crucifix. She prayed with all her soul,
prayed for light for herself and for her son, prayed for strength and
that the spark might descend upon Othomar. When she had prayed thus, so
long and with such conviction, there came over her, like an afflatus of
the Holy Ghost, a sense of peace. She became herself again, she awaited
events, regained her credulous fatalism, her conviction that nothing
happens but what must happen and is right. What was wrong did not
happen. If it were fated that Othomar must receive that spark, that
would be right; if it were fated that he must abdicate, that would be
right too, O God, right with a strange, inscrutable rightness!...

Because the days had passed without her having yet spoken to the
emperor, she hoped anew; she hoped that Othomar would be his old self
again and no longer seek his own degradation. But it was as though she
hoped in spite of everything; for, each time that she now saw Othomar,
she found him duller and more exhausted, more helpless beneath the
certainty of his weakness. Professor Barzia, who treated the prince
personally and twice a day gave him his cold-water douche in the palace,
seemed to be least uneasy about Othomar's physical weakness. The prince
was not robust, but the professor divined in his delicate constitution
the presence of the element that had sprung from the first rough,
sensual strength of the Czyrkiski race: the Slavonic element, which had
become enervated through its Latin admixtures, but had lingered on; a
secret toughness, an indestructible factor of unsuspected firmness,
which lay deep down, like a foundation, and upon which much seemed to be
built that was very slender and fragile. What had once been rude
strength the professor believed he had discovered in a certain
toughness; what had been cruelty and lust, in a certain enervation,
which had hitherto been held in check by self-restraint and a
spontaneous sense of duty, but which now suddenly revealed itself in
this excessive lassitude. Barzia distinctly perceived in Othomar the
scion of his ancestors; and he considered that, though the rich physical
vigour of the original sovereign blood had become refined, as if it were
now flowin